Farewell to the liberal consensus: the intellectualisation of political projects in Poland and Hungary

Abstract

The article investigates the intellectual foundations of the political projects led by Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán. We demonstrate that next to homegrown populist and traditionalist ideas, the radicalisation of conservative thought in the West, particularly in the USA, facilitated the illiberal turn of these two countries during the 2010s. The state-, nation- and family-centred narratives, born out of this West–East cross-fertilisation, were then re-exported abroad with considerable financial support from the countries’ respective governments. The collaboration of politicians and intellectuals, and the tolerance within the circle of the critics of liberal democracy, appear as important factors behind their success. The regimes led by PiS and Fidesz provided Western conservatives with a “proof-of-concept”, demonstrating the viability of their ideas and emboldening them to further challenge the liberal consensus.

Introduction

In September 2016 Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán took part in a panel discussion at the Krynica Economic Forum, at which they made the case for a “cultural revolution”, prioritising national identity over a unified European one (TVN24, 2016). Although the ideas they expressed were not novel, what was significant was the confidence and stridency with which the leaders of two countries that had previously been among the frontrunners of post-1989 democratisation challenged the prevalent political and economic paradigm their predecessors had obediently implemented. More than anything else, it is the political projects they have implemented that have undermined the belief that in the European Union, liberal democracy is ‘the only game in town’.

The trajectory of these projects demonstrates specific forms of cooperation between politicians and intellectuals and a particular modality of cross-regional political learning. Originally, both projects were relatively centrist and were built primarily on inherited domestic ideological constructs. Their radicalisation after the turn of the century benefitted from the ideological arguments offered by a new, more illiberal variant of Western conservatism. The Poles and the Hungarians took these arguments on board, and blended them with domestic concerns. The new narratives were then re- exported abroad with considerable financial support from the countries’ respective governments, shifting debates in Western Europe and America in an even more illiberal direction.¹This article contributes to an unfolding body of literature on the intellectual origins of the various projects of autocratisation that have emerged in several democratic polities in recent years. It identifies a close symbiosis between political and intellectual projects aiming to transform modern politics and demonstrates that instead of striving for ideological purity and thereby marginalising their appeal, the challengers of liberal democracy operate in a heterogeneous ideological landscape and appeal to multiple constituencies.

First, we provide an overview of the process of radicalisation undergone by conservative thinkers in the USA and Europe. We then identify the intellectual groups and figures at the heart of the anti-liberal dissensus in Hungary and Poland, present some of the major criticisms levelled against liberal democracy by these groups, trace their origins, and finally, map the organisational infrastructure that facilitates the linkages between the circulation of ideas and their political articulation. The comparison of the Polish and the Hungarian cases illustrates that while ideologues have been able to influence the shaping of the political agenda in both countries, the newly established intellectual institutions lack autonomy vis-a-vis the political leadership in Hungary, while in Poland there is a pluralistic and relatively autonomous landscape of conservative institutions whose members often benefit from the largesse of right-wing parties but are not entirely beholden to them.

In contrast to many studies on post-communist discourse, we relate our cases to those global ideological trends that had an impact on the region. Accordingly, our starting point is provided by the changing landscape of Western conservatism.

The conservatisms of the twenty-first century

In the aftermath of the Thatcher and Reagan years, the Western right was dominated by the ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservativism, mandating support for capitalism, globalisation and US hegemony. Currents of traditionalism, authoritarianism and antiglobalism were sidelined. In Europe, the legacy of reactionary thinkers like Joseph de Maistre, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès was confined to extremist outlets. In the USA those who opposed the fusion of conservatism and liberalism, could build on the complex anti-modernist legacy of prominent thinkers like Eric Voegelin, Alasdair MacIntyre or Christopher Lasch (Holmes 1993), but enjoyed little political influence.

The revolt against the liberal intellectual hegemony was initiated by various right-wing think tanks, particularly the Claremont Institute. Under the leadership of Harry Jaffa, Claremont—and its magazines, The American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books— elaborated an alternative to free-market conservatism. In parallel, the Federalist Society developed an anti-liberal interpretation of constitutionalism, while religious intellectuals, clustered around the magazine First Things, offered a socially conservative criticism of the capitalist mainstream. The mobilisation and politicisation of these dissenting currents was greatly facilitated by Patrick Buchanan, who asserted that the American population and their values had been sacrificed in favour of global financial interests. He gathered anti-globalist intellectuals around the journal American Conservative, partly to oppose the war against Iraq, but also to object to what he considered the moral nihilism of neoliberalism, urging the Republicans to focus on demographic issues (Fawcett 2020).

These critics of the mainstream right (sometimes labelled paleoconservatives), prioritised culture and nation over economy and openly embraced the spirit of traditional hierarchies (Gottfried 2007). Many of their prominent representatives, such as Rod Dreher, then one of the columnists of the American Conservative, argued against individualism from a localist, environmentalist, and anti-consumerist angle. Contrary to mainstream conservatives, they saw a role for state power to protect traditional values, drawing on arguments against liberal permissiveness made by legal scholars such as John Finnis, who stressed the legitimate right of political communities to judge certain forms of lifestyle, such as those associated with homosexuality, to be unacceptable and invalid (Finnis 1994: 1070).

The series of defeats experienced by the paleoconservatives during the culture wars at the beginning of the 21st century triggered their radicalisation, leading to an open rejection of liberalism, and often, though not in all instances, a comprehensive repudiation of post-war liberal democracy. Liberalism came to be seen as a self-destructive, failed enterprise that inevitably erodes the inherited civilised order (Deneen 2018, 2023). The idea that conservatives should employ state power to achieve their goals became increasingly accepted. The popular appeal of Donald Trump reinforced the belief of conservatives that they too could win cultural wars by using the same instruments deployed by liberals and progressives: “discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions” (Ahmari 2019).

The departure from liberal conservatism was made explicit in a declaration entitled ‘Against the Dead Consensus’ (Ahmari et al. 2019), signed by leading conservative journalists and thinkers. This new wave of anti-liberal conservatives saw America’s norms as “hopelessly corrupt”, needing “to be destroyed”, with the goal of “overturning the existing post-American order” (Ellmers 2021). Liberal democracy was to be replaced by a “common good constitutionalism” (Vermeule 2020): a substantive moral constitutionalism that rejects the liberal conception of state neutrality and seeks instead to legislate morality through the imposition of a conservative vision of good life on society (Rosenblatt 2021).

For some of the conservative rebels the refoundation of conservatism entails not only a radical response to ‘wokeism’ and a rejection of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, but also the incorporation of working-class concerns into conservative thinking. Steve Bannon, in particular, sought not only to articulate these ideas within the USA, but to import them to Europe, where he found kindred spirits in politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini who were already attempting to marry working-class sensitivities with ethnopopulism. A more classically right-wing opposition to neoliberalism and multiculturalism was advocated in Europe by Roger Scruton and his disciples (most notably Thierry Baudet, the founder of the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands), who blamed liberalism for taking the emancipation of the individual to the extreme, enforcing an alien cultural code on society and thereby undermining the nation, the family, and the connections between generations (Hadj-Abdou 2021).

The globalisation of the American culture wars reached Europe through the Christian Right and the ‘anti-gender’ movements (Lo Mascolo 2023). These movements drew on and contributed to an emerging international network of radical conservatism which brought together organisations active in the USA, Europe or both, such as the legal advocacy institution the European Centre for Law and Justice and “pro-family” lobbying movements such as the Centre for Family and Human Rights, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Agenda Europe, and the World Congress of Families.

These organisations disseminated policy ideas aimed at combating progressive advances and articulated the cultural and demographic fears of traditionalist citizens.

Perhaps the most ideological component of the emerging transatlantic network is provided by the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement, which was launched in the second half of the 2010s by Yoram Hazony, the president of the Edmund Burke Institute. In keeping with the agenda outlined above, this movement essays a radical critique of contemporary liberal democracy, indicting transnational institutions––most prominently the EU––as tools of liberal imperialism and rationalist universalism, and presenting democratic nationalism as a healthy alternative (Haivry and Hazony 2017; Plattner 2019). It brings together a cultural critique of moral relativism, radical feminism and left-wing censorship, a political critique of a state that allows progressive elites to intrude into the everyday life of citizens while failing to enforce traditional moral principles, and an economic critique that decries liberal disregard for the fabric of society (through, for example, the overstretching of housing, welfare and social care and also through open-door immigration) and emphasises the duty of the state to engender social integration and protect the interests of the poor. Aside from providing a forum where opponents to liberalism in the media, academia and the think-tank community can congregate, NatCon deepened their connections with prominent politicians, such as Marion Maréchal, Viktor Orbán, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, J. D. Vance and Suella Braverman.

While until the 2010s, the various postliberal, illiberal and anti-liberal conservative transnational fora were organised by Northern Americans and Western Europeans, initiatives since then have included significant input from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. For actors who turned against the “imitative modernisation” that drove post-1989 political, cultural and economic development in the region, the appeal of the increasingly anti-establishment nature of their Western counterparts proved to be irresistible. Polish and Hungarian illiberal conservatives have become particularly important players for three reasons: they have gained financial support from their governments, they represent ethnically and culturally homogenous countries that have been able to avoid making compromises on multiculturalism, and the record of electoral victories and successful public administration by openly anti-liberal parties in their countries has enabled them to project an image of efficacy. In providing practical examples of implementing an illiberal agenda, PiS and Fidesz have served as a “proof-of-concept” for opponents of liberalism, “function[ing] in the kind of way that Sweden does as a touchstone for progressive policy analysts” (Waller 2023).

The articulation of post-communist dissensus: the early years

In both Hungary and Poland, there was an early consensus among mainstream elites in favour of liberal democracy, yet the seeds of dissensus had been planted long prior to the beginning of transition. The competing ideological options present at the end of the 1980s––including collectivist, reformist-socialist, reactionary and anti-Western currents––were sidelined, but not eradicated.

In Hungary, significant opposition to liberal democracy came from intellectuals who saw party-based democracy as a betrayal of the civil society-based ethos that had informed the emergence of dissident movements. The most openly anti-liberal actors among them, representatives of the völkisch (népi) tradition, increasingly allied with the right, although they advocated for a Third Way between capitalism and socialism, criticising the West for shallow consumerism, an atomistic individualism and the neglect of national communities. This agenda was promoted by a section of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), the largest government party until 1994. Many intellectuals around MDF, especially László Tőkéczki (1995), were heirs of the Calvinist-nationalist and anti-colonialist discourse whose main twentieth century representative was László Németh, and who argued against adopting Western socio-political standards (Mishkova et al 2014). The völkisch tradition identified liberalism with Budapest Jewry. These antisemitic overtones became most explicit in the discourse of the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP), led by Istvan Csurka (formerly the vice-president of MDF).

In Poland, the opposition movement was a fertile source of ideas that did not necessarily comport with the post-1989 liberal orthodoxy, but at first remained largely reconciled to it. As early as 1979, the Young Poland Movement, which emerged from right-wing elements of the anti-communist movement, promoted conservative social values and the pro-independence thought of inter-war nationalist politician, Roman Dmowski. Many of its founders and participants would subsequently move through various iterations of the conservative political-cultural-intellectual ecosystem, some holding prominent positions in politics and the media after 1989. Polish conservative thought was also influenced by Roger Scruton’s Jagiellonian Trust, a foundation set up to support anticommunism in Central and Eastern Europe through the dissemination of conservative ideas. The bimonthly Arka magazine carried numerous contributions by Western conservatives and libertarians (Behr 2021: 11). The combination of Thatcherite economics and social conservatism advanced by this network appealed to many of those who were sceptical of mainstream Solidarity’s ambition to revive socialism. Thinkers such as Mirosław Dzielski (1995: 399) forwarded proposals for freedom through economic liberalisation, initially under the auspices of an authoritarian political system.

These intellectual traditions became politically more relevant with the increase in polarisation. In Hungary, Orbán adopted the Calvinist-nationalist tradition as the focus of his political identity, committing himself to build a country that “revolves around its own axis” (Speech on 29 May 2010)² and absorbed Csurka’s conspiratorial discourse. Gyula Tellér, for a long time Orbán’s closest advisor and the man whom Orbán thanked for giving him “the blueprint which laid out how to dismantle the regime that operated until 2010” (Orbán 2023), identified the “Investor”, the global financial speculator who is exploiting nations for centuries if not millennia, as the principal enemy of the Hungarians (Tellér 2009).

While Orbán’s ideological shift was radical and spectacular, Kaczyński’s movement towards the radical right––and by extension that of Law and Justice––was more gradual. Kaczyński’s first political vehicle, the Centre Alliance, eschewed the clericalist and nationalist leanings of numerous parties on the non-liberal post-Solidarity right, focusing instead on the need for decommunisation and the consequent “acceleration” of post-communist reforms. The consolidation of political conservatism was hampered by the hegemonic political position of the post-communist left, the fissiparous nature of the non-liberal post-Solidarity right, and the dominance of transition liberalism as a set of ideological “default positions”. Yet while conservatism “did not become the foundation for any significant political movement”, it was a wellspring of intellectual critiques of the post-1989 social, cultural and political order (Matyja 2015: 235). Conservative ideas were disseminated through numerous publications (prominent among which were the bimonthly Arcana, an offshoot of the aforementioned Arka, the Życie Warszawy newspaper and the quarterly Fronda), intellectual organisations such as the Warsaw Club of Political Critique the Centre of Political Thought and the Jagiellonian Club and through the appointment of a younger generation of conservative journalists to positions in public television (Dąbrowska 2018: 97–99). The Catholic church, which envisioned a Polish state which is “democratic in form, but Christian in content” (Gowin 1995: 73), also played a supportive role in disseminating these ideas.

In contrast to the clerical-nationalist and traditionalist league of polish families (Liga Polskich Rodzin, LPR), PiS was initially a more moderate articulation of conservatism, focusing first on the need for decommunisation and lustration. However, many of the moderately culturally conservative elements within the party were gradually sidelined by Kaczyński (or departed of their own accord) as PiS moved to the right during the 2000s. PiS’s successful shift from a marginal, predominantly urban-based party to the main representative of rural and small-town Poland was achieved in large part by yoking the conservative critique of liberal transition to the radical language and disruptive repertoires of behaviour associated with their erstwhile coalition partners, LPR and the agrarian-populist Self-Defence.

To achieve this shift, PiS drew on the conservatives’ concept of a “Fourth Republic”, a rejection of the misbegotten post-1989 Third Republic and the re-founding of a genuinely post-communist political regime (Dąbrowska 2018: 106), as the expression of an alternative agenda that rested on three pillars. Politically, Poland would recover its subjectivity after years of accepting a peripheral and subordinate status. Economically, it would undertake a ‘redistribution of prestige’ through empowerment of the economically marginalised.

Culturally, it would put an end to the ‘pedagogy of shame’ that surrounded the Polish historical narrative and the Church, described by Jarosław Kaczyński as the only legitimate source of values for Poles (Dziennik Gazeta Prawna 2019). In elaborating the elements of this agenda, from 2005 onwards PiS transformed what was initially a relatively moderate––if trenchantly expressed––critique of the liberal predicates of domestic post-transition politics into an increasingly radical ideology of opposition to liberalism in its global guise.

The West–East convergence on illiberal conservatism

As the previous section has demonstrated, at least from the 1980s onwards, illiberal thought was present in both countries in various forms–especially anti-communist, nationalist, and populist. Yet, it was only after these ideas had been merged with those of Western anti-modernist conservative ideas that they were suitable for informing the radical reorientation the two countries underwent in the third decade after transition to democracy. The change was particularly pronounced in Hungary, where the influence of Western conservatism used to be weaker. In line with Fidesz’s move to the right, the advisors and think tanks around Orbán discovered the potential in the work of Strauss, Scruton, Voegelin and Carl Schmitt (Buzogány and Varga 2018). These Western critics of liberalism and modernisation were used to emphasise the role of virtues, duties and cultural legacies allegedly neglected in liberal democracies. Building on these ideas, Fidesz made many social rights conditional on obligations, both in rhetorical terms (Lánczi 2018) and through the replacement of the welfare state with a regime of ‘workfarism’ (Szikra 2020).

In Poland, the key lines of continuity between the conservative opposition of the 1990s and the radical turn of twenty years later were the philosopher Ryszard Legutko and the sociologist Zdzisław Krasnodębski, both of whom moved from academia into politics and served as MEPs from 2014 to 2024, during which time they fluently and articulately communicated PiS’s agenda to an arena dominated by adherents of liberal democracy. Legutko’s (2016) critique of liberal democracy, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, was well received by anglophone thinkers of the post-liberal movement, and Legutko, in turn, engaged critically but largely positively with their perspectives (Legutko 2018). Krasnodębski’s (2003) Demokracja periferii (Democracy of the Periphery) was an important influence on PiS’s critique of Poland’s acceptance of a ‘post-colonial’ status in Europe after the end of communism.

The Polish and the Hungarian right proved to be highly receptive to the American conservatives’ attacks on moral relativism. Polish conservatives were particularly insisting on a fight against the “ethical trivialisation” of public life under liberalism (Łuczewski 2016: 228). This critique took a more radical and concrete form in the shape of anti-gender and anti-LGBT narratives associated at first with LPR and the ultra-conservative Catholic media network headed by Redemptorist priest Father Tadeusz Rydzyk.

But alongside such moralistic discourses, the Fidesz and PiS regimes developed an explicitly non-normative discursive framework as well, to be applied in particular to the conduct of foreign policy. In the case of Fidesz, this was expressed most clearly by Orbán in the context of relations with China: “[t]he Chinese political system is a matter for the Chinese people, just as the Hungarian political system is a matter for the Hungarian people. No one has the right to interfere with this by adopting the role of self-appointed judge” (Orbán 2016). Lánczi, a central figure in the absorption of the ideas of Strauss and Voegelin, praised Orbán’s ‘realism’; his readiness to reject universalist utopian ideas, and to decide autonomously, shaping rather than following public opinion (Körösényi et al 2020). The Polish regime has not reproduced this uber-pragmatic discourse, but a similar attitude surfaced in two ways: through resistance to the homogenising and federalising tendencies PiS discerned in a German-dominated European Union and through an aggressively-articulated transactional conception of foreign policy based on a clash of political wills rather than on common norms.

Fidesz and PiS’s embrace of an assertive foreign policy undiluted by moral concerns echoed the rediscovery on the right of Carl Schmitt’s vision of politics, in particular his conception of sovereignty as the capacity of great men to bypass the constraints imposed by liberal democracy. At the turn of the millennium, Fidesz yoked Schmitt’s ideas to those of Max Weber to justify the construction of a robust state administration with the capacity to overcome particularistic and foreign business interests. As part of the veneration of state power, Fidesz intellectuals (e.g. Fodor and Stumpf 2007) argued that the cherishing of communitarian virtues has positive effects for society and that the state has an obligation to educate individuals to become patriotic citizens. Opposing depoliticisation, technocracy, decentralisation, neoliberalism and the power of non-governmental organisations, they argued for personalised leadership and the political nature of decision-making (Fodor 2010).

The revival of interest in Schmittean ideas was also fundamental for the radical turn in Polish conservatism, particularly when PiS moved away from a legalistic approach to transition (in which Kaczyński and other prominent PiS figures had initially been involved) towards the embrace of executive decisionism (Święcicki 2021: 242; Bunikowski 2018: 12; Mazur 2016). This move was couched in the veneration of the “decision-making system” and its “power over the legal text”, concepts elaborated by the legal theorist Stanisław Ehrlich, Kaczyński’s doctoral supervisor and intellectual mentor (Sulikowski 2021: 385).

The promise of a competent, strong state that limits the excesses of individual rights was increasingly complemented by an emphasis on the right of the state to (re)organise culture. In Hungary, Balázs Orbán (no relation to Viktor), who led a thinktank before becoming a member of the government, contrasted ‘Anglo-Saxon conservatism’ that prioritises individual freedom “to an extent that is essentially ideological” with the pragmatic continental conservative thought typical of Fidesz (Orbán 2021: 169) and that allows for government intervention. In this approach, consistent with postliberal and national conservative ideas but in contrast with liberal-conservative traditions, the fundamental units of society are not individuals but traditional families. The state is elevated to the role of principal representative of the community, supra-state entities like the European Union are denied a role as foci of common identity and values, nation-states are accorded the unrestrained right to pursue their own interests, and a strong state is seen as a prerequisite for the success of citizens (Orbán, 2021: 173-183). While acknowledging that the state must be limited by the “personal, internal autonomy of its citizens”, this agenda assigns a broad and highly ideological scope to the activities of the state, which “must make decisions in the public interest, whether in regard to the tax system, cooperation with churches, fulfilling the constitutional obligation to protect Christian culture, or in the interest of the nation, prioritising those values most useful to the national community as a whole.” (Orbán, 2021: 178).

PiS built, in a similar fashion, on the diagnosis of Polish conservatives that the state “is damaged in its most important area … [that] which makes the will of the governor a reality” (Krasowski 2004). During the period 2007–2015, when the centre-right Civic Platform governed with the agrarian Polish Peasant Party, the dominant mode was a restrained technocracy derisively labelled the “warm water in the taps” approach to governing by supporters of PiS. PiS’s resistance to this bore out the reality that in post-communist conditions conservatism often required radicalism rather than caution. To reimpose authentic Polish institutions and values, it would first be necessary to destroy those imposed by liberalism.

Along with a revival of interest in Schmitt, the ideas of another early 20th-century thinker, Antonio Gramsci, inspired anti-liberal theorists. While historically associated with the left-wing politics of its progenitor, the Gramscian perspective is compatible with a radicalising conservatism, holding as it does that the key to political dominance is the ability of political actors to shape the frames and conceptual tools of cultural life and create organisations that reach beyond party politics. The ambitious programmes of autocratisation in the two countries sought, as Pirro and Stanley (2022: 90) put it, to make a decisive breach with liberalism by “forging” new policies in areas hitherto neglected by liberals, but also “bending” and “breaking” liberal laws, norms and procedures to expedite change. This constituted, in Gramscian terms, a war of movement, which was coupled with an ongoing war of position in the form of “long-term investment in ideology production and civil society penetration” (Bohle et al 2023: 10).

The Hungarian strategist most influenced by Gramsci, Márton Békés, advocated intensive participation in culture wars with the aim of establishing a post-liberal era founded in “faith instead of scepsis, community instead of the individual, nation-state instead of globalisation, work instead of credit, family instead of solitude”, welcoming the emergence of “a new conservative consensus, based on old values: God, homeland, family, nation, work, home”. Crucially, Békés recognises, that the implementation of this agenda and the creation of a “new social coalition against the cosmopolitan elite” requires the right to turn towards “more pro-state, nationalist, illiberal conservatism”, posing the question: “does conservatism dare to be sufficiently anti-liberal?” (Békés, 2022a, b: 81, 84–85).

The Eastern influence

While until the 2010s Polish and Hungarian actors were only sporadically present at transnational conservative fora, and their influence has been marginal in trans-European and trans-Atlantic networks, this has changed remarkably during the last decade. Since 2022, three CPAC conferences were organised in Budapest, and the Hungarian government contributes to the organisation of NatCon events through various intermediary organisations. Of the nine founding signatories of NatCon, Rod Dreher and John O’Sullivan have moved to Budapest, and most of the others have toured Hungary as guests of the Orbán-built institutional network. The European Conservative, the counterpart of the American Conservative, is edited in Hungary. Few Polish or Hungarian thinkers became central to the conservative canon, but Legutko’s work has proved to be influential in English-language countries.

Together with Lánczi, Legutko was one of the authors of the “Paris Statement,” an anti-liberal manifesto translated into 23 languages. Claiming that Europe was socially “unravelling” as a result of post-1968 multiculturalism and heedless materialism, the authors of this statement called for the achievement of a “consensus about moral culture”, the “order[ing] of markets towards social ends,” the restoration of a popular sovereignty that had been ousted by “technocratic tyranny”, and advocated engaging with populism as a “healthy rebellion against the tyranny of the false Europe, which labels as ‘anti-democratic’ any threat to its monopoly on moral legitimacy” (Bénéton et al. 2017).

The critique of moral relativism that lay at the heart of the Paris Statement expressed a central element of the new, non-liberal and anti-liberal forms of Western conservatism, while at the same time, it also reflected the Eastern European preference of national community over market-competition and the belief in the ability of the state to organise culture and financially support traditional families. Accordingly, Gladden Pappin (2019), who turned from American professor and editor of the magazine American Affairs into a Hungarian public official, called on American conservatives to use the state to support families, pursue national sovereignty, to defend the integrity of the national community, and in so doing, to define and protect a conception of the common good.

Next to Pappin and Dreher, a surprisingly large number of conservative intellectuals moved, whether temporarily or for longer, to Hungary, including Grégor Puppinck, the director of the European Centre for Law and Justice or Mark Granza, founder of the magazine im1776.com. Explaining why the Hungarian regime has proven so attractive to conservatives, Granza remarked that “Fidesz people are far more aware of how power works […] and far more willing to use that power in ways that American conservatives shy away from”. Where previously CEE intellectuals would head westward to receive an education in the ways of liberalism, “[s]ometimes, it feels like the American conservative future is in part being worked out here on the banks of the Danube” (Liedl 2023).

Although most Western intellectuals financed by Budapest are peripheral in their home political context, some are influential. Grants were given, for example, to Christopher Rufo and Jeremy Carl,³ important figures in American conservative circles, and Hungarian money supports the key institutions of the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party, the Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute.⁴

The idea that the individual can be replaced by the family as a fundamental unit of society partly originates in the series of Demography Summits organised in Budapest. Such conferences (attended, among others, by Mike Pence, Janez Jansa, Andrej Babis, Tony Abbott and Georgia Meloni) are instrumental in creating a bridge between the Christian Right and Eastern European elites. The Demography Summits, just like the CPAC series, are used by Fidesz to showcase Hungary’s anti-immigration, anti-woke and pronatalist policies.

The influence of these policy initiatives and narratives is amplified by the positive response from the central figures of US culture wars, including Tucker Carlson,⁵ Patrick Deneen (2023), J.D. Vance,⁶ Steve Bannon,⁷ and many others. Some evidence exists that particular policies enacted by Ron DeSantis in Florida also have their origin in Eastern Europe (Beauchamp 2022). As Rod Dreher (2022) put it in an article for the American Conservative “If Americans want to see the conservatism of the future, they should go to Budapest and learn how and why to use state power for conservative ends”––implying that the Orbán’s embrace of statism should serve as a model for the US Republicans. As one sympathetic observer has remarked, “the intellectual wellsprings of the continent now flow from the East, notably from Poland and Hungary” (Warner 2017).

Institutional infrastructure: polish-Hungarian differences

The spread of anti-liberal ideas and their increasing coalescence into something approximating an ‘illiberal manifesto’, would not have been possible without substantial investment in an extensive network comprising of think tanks, educational institutions, conferences, media outlets and scholarly exchanges. The international influence of Budapest outweighs that of Warsaw, and the answer to the question of why, lies both in the character of the leader (Orbán being much more interested in international affairs) and in the way the institutional infrastructure of the right in the two countries has been structured. In the last section of our article, we discuss these differences, and we address the question of heterogeneity within the right.

In terms of the cross-national differences, it is important to highlight first that, in contrast to Fidesz, PiS lacked a constitutional majority. The party could use governmental power to deploy campaigns to discredit “gender ideology” and “LGBT ideology” as threats to the family––and by extension to the nation––imported by liberals from an ideologically colonialising West (Korolczuk and Graff 2018: 811), and could appoint judges to limit reproductive rights, but could not change the constitutional rules.

During the period 2015–2023, when PiS was in power, significant state resources were diverted to the creation and expansion of right-wing conservative institutions. However, while Fidesz has been able to use its unchallenged political and economic hegemony to create a set of organisations entirely under its control, PiS’s influence has always remained partial.

The remarkable discipline and resourcefulness of the Hungarian knowledge production organisations can be explained with the fact that most of them were created by the political leadership. The organic institutions that existed prior to Fidesz’s ascension to power were redesigned. The most recent transformation took place in 2018 when the leading right-wing intellectual magazines Kommentár and Századvég were purged of conservatives unwilling to subscribe to an unconditionally partisan and militant editorial line. In the case of Századvég, the final issue of the previous era was destroyed and removed from the internet. The other leading conservative weekly, Heti Válasz, was closed down in the same year.

The numerous Fidesz think tanks (Fundamental Rights, Századvég, Danube Institute, 21st Century Institute, Institute for Research on Communism, etc.) exist in a close symbiosis with the state and operate with a considerable help from public funds and from businessmen with ties to the government party. Their analyses are amplified by the public TV and radio (e.g. the magazine Kommentár has its twin programme on public TV), and by several nominally private media channels. Aside from their traditional role of providing allied intellectuals with jobs and popularising government-friendly narratives, these institutions have wide-ranging foreign-facing activities. In this respect, the Danube Institute and the Mathias Corvinus College (MCC) are the most significant institutions. Both host foreign intellectuals and political activists, and MCC also educates thousands of talented young people from the age of 10 upwards. With close to one hundred visiting fellows, a separate office in Brussels, and with the ownership of the largest Hungarian chain of bookstores and the Modul University in Austria, MCC is a financial giant in the world of illiberal organisations.

PiS also aimed to create a “counterelite” cadre of conservative and nationalist intellectuals, policy specialists, civil society organisations and cultural figureheads by using state resources to promote those congenial to their ideological principles and exert pressure on liberal and left-wing actors (Bill 2022). A significant instrument for this was a newly-created state organ, the National Institute for Freedom–Centre for the Development of Civil Society, which centralised and disbursed funding to civil society organisations. While some of these organisations were more redolent of moderate conservatism, more radical movements became beneficiaries of PiS’s largesse as the party shifted further right.

As mentioned above, in contrast to the Hungarian case, organised illiberalism in Poland was more decentred and less clearly under PiS’s control. Many key institutions predated PiS’s rise to power, and pursued agendas that only partly coincided with that of PiS. While Polish illiberals benefited from access to the networks created by Fidesz, and numerous Poland-based institutions had bilateral connections with like-minded counterparts, an illiberal intellectual milieu did not coalesce in Warsaw to the same extent as in Budapest.

In contrast to Fidesz, the PiS government was often more patron than creator, making abundant use of its access to state resources to provide allied organisations with generous funding. One of the most influential beneficiaries was the ultra-conservative Ordo Iuris Institute, a legal organisation and think tank founded in 2013 and headed by lawyer Jerzy Kwaśniewski, which promotes a ‘pro-family’ agenda. Investigations identified links between Ordo Iuris and an international network of radical conservative organisations such as the European Centre for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and Agenda Europe (Dauksza 2021). The relationship between Ordo Iuris and PiS exemplifies the functional symbiosis between PiS and its counter elite more generally. While Ordo Iuris is operationally independent of PiS, the generous funding directed its way by the government enabled the organisation to expand its activities, notably including the setting up of a college of higher education, Collegium Intermarium, whose stated mission was to return to the classical European model of the university. While failing to attract many students, this organisation has––albeit on a smaller scale than its Hungarian counterparts––provided a forum for members of the post-liberal European and American right, convening events such as a conference on “cancel culture” in 2021, which attracted several luminaries of the movement, including legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, political theorist Gladden Pappin, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari.

In return, PiS benefited from the significant ideological and intellectual resources of Ordo Iuris in support of its actions against LGBT and gender ‘ideology’, divorce, and abortion, while remaining sufficiently distant for plausible deniability over some of Ordo Iuris’s more extreme positions and rhetoric. Moreover, an organisation like Ordo Iuris, staffed as it is by young, well educated, articulate, multilingual and media-competent professionals, was able to broaden the international reach of PiS’s illiberal project.

The example of the nation-wide discussion clubs founded by the Gazeta Polska current-affairs weekly also shows that Polish illiberal organisations retained more independence than the Hungarians. The electoral victory of PiS in 2015 was helped by the dissemination of illiberal ideas in this network, and, once in power, PiS made sure the Gazeta Polska clubs became beneficiaries of PiS’s largesse (Ślarzyński 2018). Yet, this network long predated PiS’s rise to power, and its genuinely grass-roots character ensured that it would not be entirely controllable. Similarly, while the more elite and exclusive right-wing Ronin Club also engaged in regular discussion of issues within PiS’s ideological purview, and many of the active participants were drawn from circles close to the party, it remained independent of political influence.

Seeking to develop institutions they could exert control over, PiS used multiple channels to finance ideologically aligned organisations. The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage founded the Institute for the Legacy of Polish National Thought, tasked with promoting national and Christian-democratic ideas. This organisation managed a Patriotic Fund, intended to support “patriotic social circles” allegedly neglected after 1989 (Instytut Dziedzictwa Myśli Narodowej 2023). In 2021, a significant portion of the fund went to organisations linked to far-right activist Robert Bąkiewicz, most notably his proto-paramilitary National Guard Association (Stowarzyszenie Straż Narodowa), an organisation set up to “bring together Poles who perceive threats emanating from the ideology forced upon us by the anti-cultural elites” (Straż Narodowa 2023).

PiS’s rise to power undoubtedly helped focus the disparate concerns of a number of conservative and nationalist organisations into an all-embracing and increasingly elaborate critique of liberal democracy. In that sense, these organisations worked to flesh out the discourse of a ‘stolen revolution’ with more substantial content, primarily referring to immigration, sexuality, protection of the traditional family, the politics of life and death, and the alleged threats to social cohesion emanating from the liberal position on each of these issues. Yet in contrast to Fidesz, PiS was not primarily a creator but a patron: it mainly used its access to state resources to help existing organisations subsist and expand, even as they remained operationally and ideologically independent. While some anti-liberal figures were drawn to Poland with varying levels of permanence, including the Spenglerian Belgian historian David Engels, the radical right columnist Matthew Tyrmand, and the alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, close and direct cooperation between the government and international radical right figures was less in evidence in Poland than in Hungary.

The above list of thinkers and activists involved in promoting the Hungarian and Polish illiberal projects suggests that they come from a perplexingly large array of ideological traditions, in spite of the existence of a well-defined ideological core, centred on nation, traditional family, Christian identification and opposition to political correctness. The wide range of the coalition becomes even more spectacular if one has a closer look at the guests of the Orbán regime. MCC, for example, hosted the atheist Peter Boghossian, who became a prominent figure in the culture war through provocations such as the submission of hoax manuscripts to feminist and critical theory journals. Frank Furedi, professor of the University of Kent, once the president of the British Revolutionary Communist Party, who later gradually moved to the right, was tasked with running MCC’s Brussels office.⁸ The regime also sponsors conservative Catholics, and it has even established an institute named after Thomas Molnar, the integralist, Maurras-follower Catholic thinker. Prominent Eurosceptic and pro-Russia actors, such as John Laughland, the Dean of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, a Kremlin-financed NGO⁹ have also been invited to undertake fellowships in Budapest.

If one considers the previously discussed central role of Calvinist-nationalist intellectuals and personalities, or the generous governmental support provided to the cultural and educational institutions of the orthodox Jewish Chabad movement,¹⁰ the conclusion must be that the only common denominator for this rapidly expanding intellectual hinterland is loyalty to Orbán and opposition to the Western liberal mainstream. The hostile responses these groups have experienced have led to a degree of convergence in their worldviews, but many fundamental differences have persisted, yet without occasioning open confrontation. It seems that the ability to avoid conflicts, to emphasise commonalities and to tolerate differences seems to be one of the key factors in explaining the success of these enterprises.

Conclusions

There has always been disagreement over the question whether liberal democracy is the only framework within which a modern society can exist. For as long as scepticism against this idea existed only at the level of attitudes, and doubts were voiced only by marginal actors, and before the opponents coalesced into networks that included both intellectuals, politicians, journalists and civil activists, these disagreements had little political weight. The creation of the increasingly formalised structures of dissensus (Coman and Brack 2024) in today’s more polarised political atmosphere required considerable organisational and intellectual work by anti-liberal actors. Hungary and Poland have been two countries at the vanguard of this process.

This paper has identified the principal ideational origins of the dissensus concerning fundamental political values, mapped the stages of its organisational development, and shown both that ideas originating outside of those countries have been employed and (mis)appropriated and that domestic ideological formulas have been exported abroad. Varga and Buzogány (2022) identify two major camps in the current illiberal wave: the revolutionary conservatives (an anti-American, nativist, often racist group), and the national-conservatives. The former group, based on the legacy of Spengler, Evola, or Schmitt, is primarily focused on opposing immigration, while the latter, where they place Fidesz and PiS, is represented by thinkers such as Strauss, Voegelin, Hazony and Deneen, and is concerned with permissive liberalism and the threat it poses to the Western moral order.

Our analysis has found that these authors have indeed played an important role in shaping discourse in the two countries. However, we have found significant influences coming from the revolutionary conservatives, integralist Catholics, leftists, and Calvinist-nationalists. The moralistic criticism of liberalism is indeed central to the rhetoric of the two regimes, but it is complemented by a competence-based, ‘realist’ narrative. The traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-globalist arguments are structured around paternalist populism (the twin veneration of the state and of the authentic people), civilisationist ethnocentrism (the marriage of particularistic nationalism with the defence of Christian civilisation) and illiberal conservatism (Enyedi 2024b). In creating these discourses, the dissenting intellectuals and organisations have borrowed from contemporary Western conservatives, but in a very selective fashion.

The illiberal drift analysed above was built on national traditions in both countries, but the ideological constructs that emerged at the beginning of the 21^st century and that sustained the illiberal regimes of these two countries owe a lot to the transformation of conservatism in the USA. The local thinkers and politicians incorporated the Western culture war rhetoric into their arguments, even though the specific issue-agenda of these countries differed significantly from the American one. After the electoral victories of PiS and Fidesz, the Western conservative circles discovered the region as a source of inspiration. Rod Dreher’s call “Turn East, Young Conservative” (Dreher 2022) signals the enthusiasm of the illiberal Western right for the ideas and policies developed in these countries, primarily for the marriage of traditionalist moral values with the high-powered executive branch of government.

Finally, our findings also indicate that while there is a growing dissensus in Europe about liberal democracy, among its opponents one finds both growing unity and mutual tolerance. This is partly due to the fact that they share a common enemy in the form of progressive liberalism, and partly is a result of the imperatives of organising and financing a broad network of opposition to it.

To conclude, in both countries examined here, domestic intellectual and political entrepreneurs closely follow international developments, engage with new intellectual projects, mould them, and use their arguments selectively. While in many cases the uses of those arguments may serve proximate political objectives, at the same time their multiple articulation is creating an intellectual and organisational substrate upon which a more robust European dissensus may come to rest in the future.