The Defeat of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy"? The Dilemma for Magyar's "Liberal Democracy"?

Peter Magyar, Leader of the Tisza Party, on the Danube River, with the Hungarian Parliament Building Behind Him

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on "The Fall of Orban's 'Illiberal Democracy.'"  I argued that the decline of freedom in Hungary under Victor Orban's rule has brought declining Christianity, declining families, declining population, and a declining economy.  I predicted that the Hungarian voters would give Peter Magyar and his Tisza party a victory over Orban and his Fidesz party.  

You might expect, therefore, that I would now be cheering for that electoral victory that occurred yesterday.  But I have decided that I can give it one or two cheers but not three cheers.  I can give it one or two cheers because the voters have voted against the corruption and economic decline in Hungary produced by Orban's "illiberal democracy" over the past 16 years.  But I cannot give it three cheers until I see that this will bring about a restoration of liberal democracy in Hungary.

Over 77 percent of the registered voters cast ballots in this election, which is the highest turnout in a Hungarian election since the collapse of communism in 1989.  Magyar's opposition party is projected to win more than a two-thirds majority in Parliament.  Ironically, this is a result of Orban's Fidesz party's alteration of the Constitution to ensure that the one party with the highest vote total gets a huge majority of Parliamentary seats even though they've won less than a majority of the votes.  Fidesz party leaders had always assumed that the opposition parties would split the opposition votes so that Fidesz would have the most votes.

This illustrates how precarious the power is in a "competitive authoritarian" system: even when the ruling party has manipulated the electoral system in its favor, it can still be defeated if the opposition is united behind a popular coalition, which is what happened yesterday.

The popularity of that coalition led by Magyar came from the widespread public resentment against the corruption and economic decline produced by the Fidesz government.  An article in the New York Times explains this by focusing on one provincial town in Hungary--Keszthely, which is located on Lake Balaton, a popular vacation spot.  For generations of Hungarians, it was popular because of its free public beaches and cheap camp sites.  But during the rule of Orban and Fidesz, the family, friends, and cronies of Orban have taken over the shoreline of Lake Balaton to build luxury hotels and apartment buildings.  Rich oligarchs have also siphoned off the money for public projects in Keszthely funded by the European Union.  As Magyar and his supporters have said: "They have stolen everything."

This has made Hungary the most corrupt government in the European Union.  And to use the terms suggested by Stephen Balch, "corruption" here corresponds to the rule of takers who steal the wealth created by the makers.  For almost 5,000 years, most governments were dominated by takers (kings, princes, nobles, and priests) who expropriated the property of the great mass of people.  Modern liberal constitutionalism created the first regimes that were "Made Safe for Making" by enforcing a rule of law that protected private property from the depredations of the takers.  An "illiberal state" like that favored by Orban returns state power to the takers--to Orban's family, friends, and cronies who can amass wealth and power at the expense of the people.

But we can't be sure that Orban's loss of power will necessarily mean a full return to liberal democracy.  There are three reasons for that.  First, we should remember that Magyar was a Fidesz loyalist for over 20 years.  So we have to worry that to satisfy his own ambition for power, that he might continue Orban's legacy of illiberal democracy.  After all, if he did that, he would be following the pattern of Orban himself, who began his political career as a liberal anti-communist before turning towards right-wing authoritarianism as the best way to achieve power.

A second reason for worry is that Orban conceded his defeat just a few hours after the polls closed, which suggests the possibility that he has decided that allowing Magyar to come to power in a time of economic crisis might prepare the way for Orban to regain power in a few years if Magyar fails to quickly turn the country around.

A third reason for worry is that Orban has filled the government, the courts, the media, and other institutions with Fidesz loyalists, who will resist any attempt to restore liberal democracy.  To overcome that resistance, Magyar might be tempted to set aside the rule of law in firing those Orban loyalists and replacing them with his own loyalists.  In other words, he might face a dilemma in deciding whether he has to use illiberal means to restore liberal institutions.

That points to the fundamental problem here that applies not only to Hungary but also to the United States.  Once a liberal democracy has passed through a period of illiberal abuses of power, it becomes hard to cleanse the regime of those illiberal practices.  Once Trump is gone, how realistic is it to expect the next president to give up the authoritarian power that Trump has exercised?

That's the most troubling question for those of us who hope for a renewal of liberal democracy after an era of illiberal executive power.

Love, Death, and Redemption: The Atheistic Religiosity of Roger Scruton and Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"

 

On December 3, 2019, Viktor Orban presented the Hungarian Order of Merit to Roger Scruton in London.  Scruton would die five weeks later from lung cancer.

In his speech honoring Scruton, Orban praised him for his work in the 1980s aiding the anti-communist underground in Central and Eastern Europe, which included Hungary.  Orban concluded the speech by saying: "He was and is a loyal friend of the freedom-loving Hungarians, who knows that this freedom relies on nation states and Christian civilization."

To identify Scruton as a supporter of "Christian civilization" is disturbing to those of us who have argued that Scruton belonged to a Kantian conservative tradition of atheistic religiosity.  Atheistic religiosity is for those who want the "magic of religious feeling" as an expression of the human mind's "religious instinct," but without having to believe in the real existence of God independent of the human mind.  They don't believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion.  And yet they want to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines.  They believe that God is dead, but they also believe that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption if they are to escape the nihilism that comes from the death of God.

I suspect that many, if not most, of the conservatives who promote "Christian civilization"--including Orban--are really Christian atheists who believe a Christian culture supports the moral and political order of a nation, but without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines.  The flimsiness of this fake Christianity explains why Orban's promotion of Hungary as a Christian nation has failed to stop the decline of Christianity in Hungary.

I have been prompted to think more about this while reading Scruton's interpretation of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004).  I have been doing this in preparation for attending a concert performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that includes the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde along with Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

REDEMPTION IN TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

Let's start with a brief synopsis of the story as Wagner tells it.

Set in the Celtic Middle Ages, the opera begins with Tristan, a knight of Cornwall, escorting Isolde, the daughter of the King of Ireland, to Cornwall where she is to marry King Marke, Tristan's uncle.  During the journey, Isolde is filled with rage and resentment towards Tristan for killing her fiancé, Morold, in battle.  Despite her anger, when Tristan stares into her eyes--which is marked musically by Wagner's "Look" motive--she is drawn to him, and their complex relationship unfolds throughout the opera.

Act 1.  Isolde, furious at her fate, wishes for revenge against Tristan.  She recalls how she had speared his life when he was wounded and disguised as Tantris.  As they approach Cornwall, she demands that Tristan drink a cup of atonement with her.  However, Brangane, Isolde's maid, secretly substitutes the poison with a love potion, causing both Tristan and Isolde to fall deeply in love with one another.

Act 2.  The love between Tristan and Isolde deepens, but they are caught in a web of duty and betrayal.  Tristan is torn between his loyalty to King Marke and his love for Isolde.  Their secret affair is discovered, leading to a confrontation that highlights the tragic nature of their love.  The act culminates in a passionate duet where they express their longing and despair.

Act 3.  The final act sees Tristan wounded in battle and longing for Isolde.  He dies in her arms, and Isolde, overwhelmed by grief, follows him into death.  The opera concludes with Isolde's poignant Liebestod (love-death) where she transcends the physical world, symbolizing the idea that true love can only be fully realized in death.

I will pass over the details of Scruton's meticulous interpretation of this opera and jump to his conclusions. 

Scruton argued that Wagner's agenda as an artist was "nothing less than the redemption of humankind," which he accomplished in Tristan and Isolde.  According to Scruton, Wagner saw that the yearning for redemption was a religious yearning, an expression of the religious instinct that is universal to human beings, and that it could be fulfilled only in "otherworldly renunciation."  But Wagner "set out to discover a redemption that needs no god to accomplish it," because he would "make man his own redeemer" (3).  He would show "what redemption could mean, when detached from every promise of a life after death" (14).

Wagner himself once described Tristan and Isolde as a story of "endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living--longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption--death, surcease, a sleep without awakening" (29).

Thus could Wagner's opera stir religious feelings of redemption in his audience without requiring any belief in religious doctrines (like the existence of God and the eternal afterlife).  In this way, Scruton insisted, Wagner proved "that religion could live again in art and did not need God for its survival," and "that man can become holy to himself with no help from the gods" (190, 196).

But I would say that at best what Wagner proved is that his operatic art could induce a fake emotion of religious redemption that could not really redeem human beings.  After all, how can human beings be redeemed through "otherworldly renunciation" if they believe that there is no "otherworld" beyond this world?

THREE POSITIONS ON REDEMPTION

The fake redemption of atheistic religiosity is only one of at least three possible positions that musical artists can take on redemption.  

A second position is the real redemption that can come through a musical composition like Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion or Handel's Messiah, which induce religious emotions of redemption but also teach religious doctrines of redemption by eternal salvation.  The members of the audience who are not Christian believers can feel the power of those religious emotions.  But the Christian believers in the audience can also understand the promise of their redemption because they know that their Redeemer really exists, and He will raise them from the dead to eternal life in Heaven.

A third position that a musical artist can take on redemption is that there is no need for redemption from life because life--even with its suffering, vulnerability, and mortality--is inherently good.  And for that reason, we can calmly accept the end of life in death as the completion of our life's journey.  That position is artistically conveyed in Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

In 1948, Strauss was 84 and composing his last music before his death the next year.  His Four Last Songs were for soprano and orchestra.  He wrote to Kirsten Flagstad to express his wish that she would be the soprano for the world premiere of these songs.  And indeed the premiere occurred in London in 1950, after his death, sung by Flagstad with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler.  (Remarkably, Flagstad had sang as Isolde at Covenant Garden, London, in 1936.)

As he composed this music for a soprano, Strauss probably heard the voice of his wife Pauline de Anha, who had sung as a professional soprano.

The lyrics for the four songs are poems.  The first three by Herman Hesse, the fourth by Joseph Eichendorff.

In the first, Fruhling ("Spring"), the soprano's voice rises up as she dreams of trees and sky, and the flute evokes birdsong.

In the second, "September," there is an allegorical passage from life to death.  The first stanza reads:

The garden is mourning,

the rain sinks coolly into the flowers.

Summer shudders

as it meets its end.

It ends with Summer closing "its large eyes grown weary."

In the third song, Beim Schlafengehen ("While going to sleep"), the soprano yearns to forget all thoughts in sleep.  The first stanza reads:

Now that the day has made me so tired,

my dearest longings shall 

be accepted kindly by the starry night

like a weary child.

In the final song, Im Abendrot ("In the twilight"), we hear about an old couple at the end of life.  It begins with an orchestral depiction of sunset, with two trilling flutes representing a pair of larks ascending into the sky (the souls of the old couple).  We can imagine that here Strauss was thinking of his long and happy marriage with Pauline de Anha, who would die in 1950 only eight months after his death.  Here in this song, they are contemplating the end of life together.

The light fades as the song unfolds, and then the soprano asks, in the last line, Ist dies etwa Tod? ("Is this perhaps death?") 

The orchestra then whispers the "transfiguration" theme from Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, which he had written 60 years before.  Strauss is saying goodbye by wistfully suggesting that he has come full circle from his early life to his end.

Although "transfiguration" might suggest the need for redemption, the tone and meaning of Strauss's Four Last Songs are very different from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.  Strauss's songs convey not an unquenchable longing for redemption from life (like that of Tristan and Isolde) but a serene completion of life in the old couple's calm acceptance of their inevitable ending of their lives together: "Is this perhaps death?"

Human Freedom Makes "A World Safe for 'Making'"

For the distinction between making and taking, see the previous post.

PERSONAL FREEDOM AS THE NATURAL GROUND OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM

Stephen Balch has identified the “anti-taking” ideologies as “classical liberal or libertarian” (2014, 16n.16).  He has also spoken of “pro-maker rights theories, such as those of John Locke” (315).  In passages like the following, he certainly seems to be endorsing classical liberalism or libertarianism as the moral argument of his book:

At the great anomaly’s heart lies the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods.  That signal "achievement"—if it can be called such, a lot turned on luck—gave birth to a ‘World-Safe-for-Making (the underlying meaning of bourgeois constitutionalism, wherein, through a variety of normative and institutional practices, coercive power was contained in scope, increased in predictability, policed against private abuse, and when publicly employed, generally to serve, not subvert, industrious behavior.  Spared senseless exactions and arbitrary demands, science, invention, manufacture, commerce and banking gradually became career paths of choice for society’s best and brightest.  Because of this, when further powered by science, the World-Safe-for-Making (WSM) sparked a tremendous explosion of productive behavior and consumable wealth, the second ‘Cambrian’ (after agriculture) of human history.  Unquestionably a major metaevolutionary turn due to a new keystone (311).

When he speaks about “the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods,” I’m reminded of James Payne’s History of Force, which makes the Lockean libertarian argument that declining violence means increasing liberty, and that the only justified use of force is as the reactive forcible punishment of those who initiate force.

When he speaks of the Western bourgeoisie as the makers, this evokes Deirdre McCloskey’s argument for liberalism as the celebration of the “bourgeois virtues.”

But then I wonder why Balch is not more vigorous in affirming the classical liberalism or libertarianism of WSM.  The answer seems to be that while he can give WSM one or two cheers, he can’t give it three cheers because of its “critical weakness” in failing to separate “property rights” from “personal rights.”  He explains this failure as arising from John Locke’s assertion of “property rights as an outgrowth of personal rights” (320).  He cites paragraph 6 of the Second Treatise, where Locke explains the law of nature as a no-harm principle rooted in the equal liberty of human beings: “that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”  He also could have cited paragraph 27, where Locke grounds property ownership in self-ownership: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person.  This no Body has any Right to but himself.  The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”  A man makes something his property by mixing his labor with it.  Elsewhere Locke identifies “labor” as “human industry,” which suggests that what he calls “labor” is what we today would call “human capital.”  

I have argued that Locke’s rooting of ownership in self-ownership is confirmed by the evolutionary neuroscience of interoception—the neural self-ownership of the body.

The “critical weakness” here, Balch says, is the failure “to separate the liberties of commerce from the emancipation of individuals in their intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral capacities" (320).  The WSM would be better off, he suggests, if it protected economic liberty but repressed personal liberty (the “intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral capacities”).  But I don’t see how that would work.  For example, if intellectual liberty were suppressed, that would have made the Scientific Revolution impossible, and yet Balch insists that the WSM would have been impossible without modern science.

Balch identifies four ways in which WSM has been weakened by its promotion of personal liberty (178-180, 317-320; 2014, 16-18).  (1) The disarming of the makers—particularly, the waning of the tradition of trained middle-class militia—makes it unlikely that people would ever again rise up in arms to defend their liberties from tyranny.  (2) Modern mass democracy has favored the expansion of the modern welfare state, which has become a new taker regime, although the “take” is not just for a few takers but widely distributed among many.  (3) The personal freedom of thought and speech has given too much power to intellectual elites who attack the liberal social and political order by elevating taking over making.  (4) The personal freedom to choose hedonistic lifestyles--such as pursuing sexual pleasure without producing or caring for children--weakens our moral character and lowers our genetic fitness.

Although I see some truth in all four of these points, I see no reason here to conclude that the WSM has been, or will soon be, destroyed by its promotion of personal liberty.   Ultimately, this comes down to a question of empirical evidence.  Is there any evidence for a trade-off between economic freedom and personal freedom, as you argue, so that as personal freedom goes up, economic freedom goes down?  On the contrary, it seems to me, that in most countries, higher personal freedom is correlated with higher economic freedom.  I see evidence for that in the Human Freedom Index.

In the Human Freedom Index, for each of 87 indicators of freedom, countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 represents the highest level of freedom.  The scores for each of 12 subcategories are averaged.  These are then averaged for personal freedom and economic freedom.  The final score for freedom in general is the average of these two, so that personal freedom and economic freedom are weighed equally.  The Human Freedom Index 2025 ranks countries based on data for 2023.

Here is a sampling of the rankings, with the scores for Personal Freedom (PF), Economic Freedom (EF), and Human Freedom (HF).

1.     Switzerland (PF: 9.77, EF: 8.28, HF: 9.15)

2.     Denmark (PF: 9.75, EF: 8.02, HF: 9.15)

3.     New Zealand (PF: 9.51, EF: 8.33, HF: 9.02)

4.     Ireland (PF: 9.54, EF: 8.05, HF: 8.92)

15. USA (PF: 9.15, EF: 8.10, HF: 8.71)

19. UK (PF: 9.12, EF: 7.88, HF: 8.60)

162. Sudan (PF: 3.97, EF: 4.00, HF: 3.98)

162. Yemen (PF: 3.19, EF: 5.08, HF: 3.98)

164. Iran (PF: 3.36, EF: 4.37, HF: 3.78)

165. Syria (PF: 2.31, EF: 4.62, HF: 3.27)

The United States ranks at 15^th in Human Freedom, 22^nd in Personal Freedom, and 5^th in Economic Freedom.

I don’t see any confirmation here of Balch's prediction that increasing personal freedom is correlated with decreasing economic freedom.  On the contrary, economic freedom and personal freedom seem to go up or down together.

There are a few exceptions, however.  For 2023, Singapore ranks #2 in economic freedom out of 165 countries (score: 8.50), but only #84 in personal freedom (score: 7.19), which gives Singapore an overall human freedom rank of #51 (score: 7.73).  Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) shows the same pattern of high economic freedom but low personal freedom: #1 out of 165 in economic freedom (score: 8.55), but #88 in personal freedom (score: 7.05), with an overall human freedom ranking of #53 (score: 7.68).

Having been a British colony, Hong Kong was returned to Chinese authority in 1997, and beginning around 2012, China imposed severe restrictions on personal freedom in Hong Kong.  For the year 2012, the Human Freedom Index ranked Hong Kong as #1 in human freedom, #1 in economic freedom, and #18 in personal freedom.  So there was a big drop in personal freedom from 2012 to 2023.

Would Balch have to say that Singapore and Hong Kong today have achieved the most desirable form of the "World Safe for Making," because they have high economic freedom but low personal freedom, and so they are free from the social weaknesses that arise from too much personal freedom?

The problem, however, is that both Singapore and Hong Kong show what Balch regards as the greatest social weakness of modern liberal societies--a low fertility rate. Singapore's total fertility rate is 1.26.  Hong Kong's is 1.44.  This is well below the replacement level of 2.1.  By comparison, the fertility rate for the U.S. is 1.79.

I don’t understand why Balch thinks the “demographic transition" is a threat to "human species survival" (183, 188).  Obviously, with over 8.3 billion people alive today, the world is not underpopulated.  Even those free societies with low birth rates can have growing populations as long as their freedom attracts immigrants.   That was Locke's argument for open borders and evolutionary group selection.

Parents investing in a small number of children is a prudent reproductive strategy in certain ecological conditions.  It can be explained by an "embodied capital theory of life history evolution" (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan).  There are many trade-offs in parental investment.  One of them is the tradeoff between the quantity of offspring (investing in a large number of offspring but with each receiving little investment) and the quality of children (investing in a lesser number of offspring but with each receiving a lot of investment).  In a bourgeois liberal society, many parents will choose quality over quantity.

I see no evidence of any weakening in the natural desire for parental care in America or elsewhere.  The Pew Research Center has reported that the percentage of American women ages 40-44 who are mothers rose to 86% in 2016 from a low of 80% in 2006 and close to the high of 90% in 1976.

Presumably, Balch would support governmental programs for raising fertility rates.  But there's no reason to believe that such programs work.  Strangely, he claims that Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were “genocratic utopias” in supporting ethnic genetic interests, as argued by Pierre Van Den Bergh and Frank Salter (57, 102, 133, 186)?  But Salter has complained that the drop in the total fertility rate for native Germans continued under the Nazis, and that none of the “ethnic states” has ever raised the fertility of their ethnic group.  As I noted in a previous post, despite Victor Orban's vigorous "pro-family" policies, Hungary still has one of the lowest fertility rates for any country.

IS THE WELFARE STATE A NEW TAKING REGIME?

Another way in which personal freedom subverts economic freedom, according to Balch, is through the expansion of the modern welfare state into a new kind of taking regime.  He worries about the "'taking-favoring' redistributive creeds like social democracy" that promote the modern welfare state.  He muses:

The heightened power . . . that the "world-made-safe-making" gave the propertyless led to a conceptual inversion, a means of preventing state redistribution become one for advancing and legitimating it.  The triumph of personhood over property secured slavery's demise, full equality of women and other historic achievements, but it also transformed property from the cynosure of freedom into a political parceled entitlement.

. . .

It's true, that unlike yesteryear, today's "take" is not just for the mighty but widely distributed among (as well as taken from) all-and-sundry.  With votes to bestow on politicos, some of the masses have become net "taking" winners, a plus perhaps in the scales of justice, if not necessarily for social productivity and individual autonomy (2014, 18).

Against this, I have argued that a capitalist welfare state can be compatible with individual liberty in securing both personal freedom and economic freedom.  Here what I argue is similar to what Friedrich Hayek recommended in Part 3 of The Constitution of Liberty, which was entitled "Freedom in the Welfare State."

The most extensive welfare states in Europe are in the Nordic social democracies--Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland.  Although they are sometimes identified as democratic socialist systems, they are not really socialist in any strict sense. Rather, these are all capitalist welfare states in that they combine social welfare programs with largely free-market capitalism.

This is indicated by their Human Freedom Index rankings for Human Freedom (HF), Personal Freedom (PF), and Economic Freedom.

                       HF    PF    EF

Denmark         #2     #2    #9

Finland           #7     #9    #15

Iceland           #11   #11  #23

Sweden          #12   #6    #35

Norway         #16   #4    #48

This compares favorably with the U.S.--#15 (HF), #22 (PF), and #5 (EF).

With the possible exception of Norway, there does not seem to be any correlation between a high ranking for personal freedom and a low ranking for economic freedom.

To me, this indicates that the capitalist welfare state belongs to the "World Safe for Making."  It is not a new taking regime.

"Makers" and "Takers" in the Paleolithic

Libertarians and classical liberals have long argued for defending the makers who produce wealth from the takers who expropriate it (Contoski 1997; D'Amato 2018).  The makers need protection because for most of recorded human history over the past 5,000 years, most societies have been ruled by a few takers (kings, princes, nobles, and high priests) who coercively exploited the great multitude of people who were the makers of wealth that was stolen from them by the takers.  In these societies, there was little incentive for the makers to produce more than they could consume since most of what they produced would be taken from them, and consequently the general standard of living was low.  

But then, beginning about 300 years ago in northwestern Europe and North America, there was a shift in social conditions that made the life strategy of making--producing wealth for use and exchange--more successful than the life strategy of taking--extracting wealth from others.  That shift in favor of making over taking came with the establishment of modern liberal constitutionalism and free-market capitalism.  Over the past 100 years those institutions of liberal democratic capitalism have spread around the world.  As a consequence of that, most of the 8.3 billion people alive today live longer, healthier, safer, richer, and freer lives than human beings have ever lived previously.  Previously, I have written about this as the "evolution of human progress through the liberal enlightenment.

So how do we explain this pattern in human history--5,000 years of oppression by the ruling elites of takers and then the sudden emancipation of makers that has promoted unprecedented material and moral progress recently for most of humanity?  And if we can explain the causes of that modern progress, how might that help us to prevent any weakening or even reversal of that progress that would allow the takers to regain their dominance over the makers?  Does the recent rise of the "illiberal state"--like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example--show the return of the illiberal "taker state"?

One of the best attempts to answer those questions is in the work of Stephen Balch (a scholar at Texas Tech University).  In an article (Balch 2014) and in a book that is soon to be published, he puts the history of the struggle between takers and makers within a Darwinian "big history" that integrates the history of life and the history of humanity into a universal evolutionary history of all life.  It is an exhilarating display of expansive multidisciplinary scholarship that weaves insights from the life sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities into a dazzling intellectual tapestry that will forever change the way you think about life.

I have not yet fully thought through everything he has written about what he calls his "naturalist interpretation of history."   But I understand enough of it to say that I find almost all of his arguments persuasive.  I do disagree with him, however, about four points. 

First, Balch fails to see that most of what he says about the universal history of politics--from Paleolithic stateless societies to Neolithic agrarian states to modern liberal constitutional states--confirms John Locke's account of the universal "history of mankind." 

Second, Balch also fails to see that the struggle between takers and makers arose first among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, although he is certainly right in saying that that struggle was dramatically intensified by the invention of agriculture, which created an economic surplus that allowed takers to accumulate great wealth in the form of expropriated crops.  

Third, in his account of the first agrarian states, such as those in Mesopotamia, Balch tends to exaggerate the invincible dominance of the ruling takers, while minimizing the power of the makers to resist or evade exploitative dominance.

Fourth, I don't agree with Balch's claim that classical liberals like Locke have been mistaken in understanding property rights as an outgrowth of the personal rights of self-owning individuals.  Balch wants to separate economic freedom from personal freedom because he worries that personal freedom can include maladaptive behavior such as pursuing sexual pleasure in ways that do not lead to reproduction, which lowers reproductive fitness.  But here he fails to see that a low birth rate can be an adaptive reproductive strategy for people in wealthy societies who want to make a large parental investment in a few children, so that those children will be more likely to succeed in a modern bourgeois society.

Here I will elaborate my second point of disagreement.  In my next post, I will take up the fourth point.

PALEOLITHIC MAKERS AND TAKERS

Among hunter-gatherers, the takers are people who take without giving.  They take what they want from the social resources of their group without contributing anything to those resources: they are free riders or social parasites.  The takers are either cheaters who take what they want by deception, or bullies who take what they want by force.  

The makers respond to this by consenting to moral rules against taking and enforcing those rules with reputational and forcible punishments of those who violate the rules.  Reputational punishment includes ridicule, ostracism, and shunning.  Forcible punishment--including execution--is directed against the worst bullies, particularly murderers (Boehm 2012, 64-74).

Balch does not see this conflict between makers and takers among hunter-gatherers because he thinks that conflict arose only after the invention of agriculture.

"Taking" only came fully into its own when there was some real "take" to be had, when there was a redistributable surplus over and above what was required for individual survival.  The invention of agriculture set the stage.  Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived egalitarian lives.  There was marginal advantage to be had through superior hunting/gathering/fighting/nurturing/negotiating and seduction skills, but--with only so much to go around--rarely big genetic jackpots.  Once, however, there was a possibility of massive wealth accumulations in the form of expropriated crops, all this changed (2014, 12).

"Genetic jackpots" are important for Balch because he believes that the evolution of human nature by kin selection favors what biological theorists call "inclusive fitness": we are naturally inclined to behaviors that advance the reproductive fitness of ourselves, our offspring, and our collateral relatives.  Although we experience some genetic conflicts of interest with our relatives because they are not genetically identical to us, our conflicts of interest with non-kin are much deeper.  We fight with non-kin over scarce resources as we try to take as much as we can for ourselves and our relatives.  But prior to the invention of agriculture, there wasn't much to fight over, and so it was impossible for the takers to accumulate great wealth that they had taken from the makers.  Consequently, Balch argues, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands were egalitarian in that there was no dominant elite of a few takers ruling over a multitude of exploited makers.

But this ignores the fact that while hunter-gatherers have always been egalitarian, their societies have achieved not an absolute equality but rather--to use Christopher Boehm's term--an "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, hunter-gatherers see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects.  By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally unequal, in any number of respects.  But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without their consent.  

A few human beings have a natural desire for dominance--to be the alpha male who rules over others--and these are those whom Balch identifies as the takers.  And while human beings in subordinate positions are naturally inclined to defer to the dominant few, the subordinates are also naturally inclined to resist being exploited by those dominant few.  Thus, Boehm observes, the political nature of human beings is ambivalent in showing the tension between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  The natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates not to be dominated.

In an egalitarian hierarchy, the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or even execution--to restrain politically ambitious individuals, those with special innate or learned propensities to dominate.  In every society, there will be leaders in some form.  But an egalitarian hierarchical society will allow only a moderate degree of leadership.  Here the power of the takers is checked by the resistance of the makers.

In a few passages of his book, Balch seems to recognize this.  In speaking about how Boehm and Richard Wrangham describe the hunter-gatherer "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA), Balch sees “a strain of oligarchy” and “targeted conspiratorial killing," which points to egalitarian hierarchy and the conditions for some taker/maker conflict.  He suggests that when he says that the worst bullies had to be eliminated (59, 126-27), and “the tension between hierarchical power and leveling morality has been a constant of human history” (129).

Moreover, what Balch calls “primal morality” in the EEA corresponds to what Locke calls the “law of nature” in the hunter-gatherer state of nature (60, 126-29, 218-19).  Locke’s law of nature is enforced by the “executive power of the law of nature”—the right of everyone to punish transgressors through reputational and forcible punishment, which would be supported by Boehm and Wrangham.  What Boehm and Wrangham say about killing bullies in the EEA confirms Paul Bingham’s argument about the importance of “killing from a distance” in enforcing cooperation.

REFERENCES

Balch, Stephen H. 2014. "On the Fragility of the Western Achievement." Society 51:8-21.

Balch, Stephen H.  Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Progress.  Book manuscript.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Contoski, Edmund. 1997. Makers and Takers: How Wealth and Progress Are Made and How They Are Taken or Prevented. Minneapolis, MN: American Liberty Publishers.

D'Amato, David. 2018. "'Makers' and 'Takers' in Libertarian Thought."  https://www.libertarianism.org.

The Fall of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy." Fukuyama Was Right.

 

        Viktor Orban with J. D. Vance and Rod Dreher in Washington, D.C., November 2025

     

                                                                        Peter Magyar

"It's nice to have a strong man running your country."  That's what Donald Trump once said about Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.  One indication of his political strength is that he has been Prime Minister since 2010, which makes him the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe.

But that could be ended by the parliamentary elections coming up on April 12, because polling shows that Peter Magyar is leading Orban in the race to become the next Prime Minister.  Magyar is a former Orban loyalist in Orban's Fidesz party who now leads the opposition party Tisza.

If Orban loses, that would signal the collapse of the international right-wing movement for populist nationalism because Orban's illiberal regime in Hungary has been the model for that movement.  That explains why Trump and Vance have endorsed Orban for reelection, and why Vance has been visiting Hungary to support Orban.  There are reports that Vance will appear with Orban at a campaign rally in Budapest a few days before the election.  Trump and Vance are desperately worried that Orban's defeat would be a crushing blow to the international MAGA movement.

But Magyar's victory would be just the final nail in the coffin for Orban's regime, which has been in decline for years now.  There are at least three signs of that decline.  Orban's policies for strengthening Hungary's families have failed to raise the female fertility rate.  Orban's promotion of a "Christian Hungary" has failed to revive Hungarian Christianity.  And, finally, huge numbers of Hungarians have been voting with their feet against Orban's regime by emigrating to Western European countries that offer them a better life than what they can have in Hungary.  The fact that these emigrants are going to those European nations that rank high on the Human Freedom Index confirms the argument of Francis Fukuyama that most human beings today regard the liberal social order that secures human freedom as the best regime.

THE ILLIBERAL STATE

As a young student and lawyer, Orban was originally a liberal anti-communist.  In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Young Democrats (with the acronym FIDESZ), which challenged the Hungarian Young Communist League.  In 1989, Fidesz became a political party that supported the overthrow of the communist regime in 1990.

In 1989, Orban studied at Oxford University on a research fellowship funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist whom Orban now denounces as the conspiratorial funder of liberal causes in Eastern Europe.

In 1990, he left Oxford early so that he could return to Hungary to run in the first post-communist parliamentary elections.  He was elected a Member of Parliament, and he became a leader in Fidesz.

In 1994, after Fidesz lost the parliamentary elections badly, Orban decided that if he was to have any chance of becoming Prime Minister, he would have to move Fidesz away from its center-liberal position and towards the sort of right-wing populism that had propelled Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister of Italy (Higgins 2025; Szelenyi 2022).  He was willing to change his political principles if he thought that would help him win votes and gain political power.  And, indeed, he became prime minister in 1998.  But he lost the general election in 2002.

In 2010, Orban returned as prime minister, and this time, he wanted to make sure that he would remain in power for many years.  He began silencing or taking over media outlets that he considered hostile to Fidesz.  He had the government fund an elaborate propaganda apparatus serving Fidesz.  He wrote a new constitution that would make it difficult for his opponents to win control of the parliament.  He removed the civil service protection for many government employees, and replaced them with his loyalists. He also took control of the courts so that he could appoint judges loyal to him.  

All of this supported what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002, 2010) have called "competitive authoritarianism."  Somewhere between a fully authoritarian regime and a fully democratic regime, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power.  And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose.  But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.

These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow.  A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance.  A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance.  A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.

In a speech in 2014 that attracted attention around the world, Orban explained that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state."  He said that this would break away from the principles of liberal democracy that had dominated the global regime (including Hungary) from 1990 to 2010.  Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, he argued, it had become clear that the Western liberal social, economic, and political order based on the principle of individual freedom had failed.  This created an opening for newly emerging global powers based on illiberal nationalism--nations like Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

Previously, Orban observed, the liberal states in Western Europe had been organized around the liberal principle of individual freedom: "With regard to the relationship between two people, the starting point of the liberal organization of society is based on the idea that we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party."  Here Orban paraphrased the definition of freedom adopted by John Locke--freedom as not being constrained or coerced by others, so long as one does not infringe on the same freedom for others (see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 57).

Notably, Orban did not completely reject this liberal principle of freedom.  But he did insist that this would not be the central organizing principle of the illiberal state.

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people's personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced.  In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed.  And so in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.  It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.

So Orban's illiberal state would secure some individual freedom, but there must also be a "national approach," because "the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community."  Here you see why the conservative communitarian critics of liberal individualism--like Patrick Deneen, Roger Scruton, and Rod Dreher--have all made their pilgrimages to Budapest to honor Orban and receive his praises for their promotion of Orbanism in the United States and the UK (Szelenyi 2022).  Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 so that he could be a part of Orban's propaganda operation--particularly, the Danube Institute, a state-backed think tank for disseminating Orban's ideology (Worth 2026).

I should say, however, that the Danube Institute does show some commitment to the liberal principle of open debate and freedom of thought.  Their mission statement includes this passage:

Our primary audience is the universe of centre-right intellectuals, political leaders, and public-spirited citizens. But we will also engage our counterparts on the democratic center-left in vigorous and principled public debate on as many occasions as possible and appropriate. We hope to draw upon the best minds of our day across national boundaries in international forums.

A recent example of their commitment to the liberal principle of intellectual freedom and debate is their event debating the question "Is Liberalism a Threat to Religious Liberty?"  One of the invited participants was Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, who is best known for his philosophic and legal arguments for gay rights.  His response to the proposed question was to suggest that this was a weird question, because since religious liberty originated as a principle of Lockean liberalism, to suggest that liberalism could threaten religious liberty was nonsensical.

If you peruse the website of the Danube Institute, you can see their concern for thinking through all of the themes of Orban's illiberal state, two of the most prominent being Christianity and family life.

DECLINING CHRISTIANITY

In 2018, Orban declared that Hungary must be a "Christian democracy," and "a Christian democracy cannot be liberal" (Orban 2018).  A Christian democracy cannot be liberal because "it gives priority to Christian culture" over all other cultures, and therefore it denies the liberal principle of multiculturalism.

But Orban was vague about what exactly he meant by "Christian culture."  Most confusing was his claim that in affirming the importance of Christian culture, he was not affirming any Christian doctrines of faith.

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith--in this case Christian religious articles of faith.  Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation.  Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected.  Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them.  These include human dignity, the family, and the nation--because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.  Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities.  This--and not the protection of religious articles of faith--is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban's statement is incoherent.  On the one hand, he says that a Christian democracy must be illiberal.  On the other hand, he says that a Christian democracy must not enforce any religious articles of faith and must secure the freedom of all "faith communities," which sounds like the liberal principle of religious liberty and toleration.  

Christian democracy would be truly illiberal if it meant some form of Christian integralism or theocracy (like medieval Catholicism or 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony).  But clearly Orban does not want that.  If he doesn't want the state to enforce any religious doctrines, that sounds like liberal democracy.  Indeed, Rod Dreher has said that authentic Christianity "can't exist if liberal democracy goes away" (Worth 2026, 36).  And as Koppelman pointed out, when the Danube Institute defends religious liberty, they're defending a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism.

Moreover, if Christianity supports "the preservation of nations," as Orban says, does that mean the preservation of nations with diverse religious traditions?  Europe has some predominantly Muslim countries--such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey--and in some cases, these Islamic traditions go back to the Middle Ages.  So it would seem that Orban's nationalism would have to allow for Islamic nationalism.  But then Orban's Christian democracy has been interpreted by many of his supporters as a defense of Christian Europe against Islam.

Another problem here is that by insisting that the state must not enforce any religious doctrines, Orban implies that religious freedom should include freedom of thought for atheists.  The fundamental religious doctrine of monotheism is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth" (the Apostle's Creed), and if Orban does not think the state can enforce belief in that doctrine, then he must think that atheists are free from persecution.

So in saying that Christian democracy supports Christian culture but not Christian doctrines, Orban implicitly endorses the kind of atheistic religiosity promoted by conservatives like Roger Scruton, who want to enjoy the religious feelings that sacralize a national culture but without the religious belief in the real existence of God outside the human mind.  (The vacuousness of ritualized Christian culture without Christian belief was manifest three years ago in the coronation of King Charles III as the Christian King of Great Britain.)

But in the long run, believing in the importance of Christian culture without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines fails to slow the decline of that Christian culture.  We can see that in Orban's Hungary.

According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the majority of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  In the census of 2022, 42.5% identified themselves as Christians, 1.3% as non-Christian religious believers, 16.1% as not religious, and 40.1% refused to answer.  Since it's unlikely that religious believers would refuse to answer the question, those who did refuse are probably not religious.  That means, then, that 56.2% of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  And since most of the houses of worship in Hungary reportedly have few people attending, we can assume that most of those who identify themselves as religious are not devout believers.

If creating a Christian democracy in Hungary means that at least a majority of Hungarians are serious Christians, then Orban has failed to achieve that.

But that doesn't mean that Christianity cannot rebound in Hungary.  The number of Catholics and Reformed Protestants has dropped by about one half in 20 years.  But Hungary's fastest growing Christian church is the Hungarian Faith Church, which is a charismatic Pentecostal form of Christianity.  With its headquarters in Budapest, it has over 150,000 members, of which over 70,000 are in Hungary.  In a nation of 9.8 million people, those are impressive numbers when you consider that this church was founded as recently as 1979 by seven Hungarians.  Notably, Orban's son Gaspar Orban converted in 2014 to the Faith Church, and he has even become a minister in the church who claims to have received revelations from God and witnessed miraculous healings.

As I have argued, Christianity originated as a charismatic or Pentecostal form of religion rooted in animistic shamanism.  Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners.  The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.

The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues.  Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.

                              A Fresco of the Pentecostal Dove, Symbolizing the Holy Spirit

As long as we have liberal social orders with religious liberty, we will have free markets in religion that will allow the more charismatic Pentecostal religions to gain a growing share of the market because they appeal to the natural human desire for religious transcendence in making contact with the spiritual world through shamanic practices.  Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with over 600 million adherents worldwide.  So while Christianity in general might be in decline today in Hungary and elsewhere, we can expect a continuing revival of charismatic Christianity.

DECLINING FAMILIES

One reason why Christian culture is so important for Orban is that he sees it as supporting the traditional family with lots of children.  And that's important because families having and rearing many children resolves what Orban has said (in a 2017 speech) is "the greatest existential question for European civilization"--Will the drastic decline in Europe's population continue until there are hardly any Europeans left?

In that 2017 speech, Orban lamented that the population of Hungary had declined from 10,709,000 in 1980 to 9,799,000 in 2017, so that in less than 40 years, Hungary had lost almost a million people, which was more than all the casualties that Hungary sustained in World War II.

Orban announced that "Making Families Strong Again" would be the motto for the Hungarian government's family policies directed to raising the birth rate.  He explained:

It is important to highlight that the restoration of natural reproduction is a national cause; and it is not just one national cause among many, but the national cause.  And it is also a European cause: not just one European cause among many, but the European cause.  The goal of the Government of Hungary is to raise our birth rate to 2.1 per cent by 2030, which would be a replacement rate for our society.  At present, this figure stands at 1.5 per cent.

The technical term for the birth rate is the "total fertility rate" (TFR), which is a measure of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for the ages 15-49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year.  So this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year, and if she survived throughout all her childbearing years. 

If there were no mortality until the end of a woman's childbearing years, the replacement level of TFR would be around 2.0.  The replacement fertility rate is close to this for most industrialized countries.  For the global average, the TFR at replacement is about 2.33.  Here "replacement" means maintaining the present level of population into the future.

The drop in fertility rates that has occurred in most of the wealthier nations over the past hundred years has been called "the demographic transition" by demographers.  In the most developed societies today, the rich and powerful tend to have low fertility rates, and it's the lower class people who have higher fertility rates.  So as societies become wealthier, the total fertility rate for the whole society tends to drop, and over the past 70 years, it has dropped below replacement levels.

I have argued that one can explain this in Darwinian terms through the "embodied capital theory of human life history."  In the developed societies, the economic and social success of children depends ever more on their acquired technical skills and educational training, so that as adults they can compete for jobs that require special talents and knowledge. Consequently, rearing successful children in such societies requires that parents make increasingly costlier investments in the education of their children.  And as the cost of children has thus increased, the quantity of children demanded by parents has decreased, because parents now express their natural desire for parenting successful children by investing more resources in fewer children, thereby choosing quality over quantity in their children.

Moreover, for human beings to be able to invest so much in their children, they must first invest time and energy in their own education and career development and in the search for suitable mates.  Consequently, successful people in modern developed societies must often delay their marriage and having children, and thus the average ages for getting married and having the first child have risen.  When women do this, they sometimes reach the end of their reproductive years, and so produce fewer children than they would have desired.  It's likely that one reason for the total fertility rate falling below replacement levels is that couples who desire two or three children delay marriage and reproduction for so long that the women reach the end of their physiological fertility sooner than they had expected.  Then couples must rely on fertility treatments or adoption to satisfy their parental desires.

Orban has been trying to reverse this tendency to lower fertility through governmental policies that promote marriage and large families.  Hungary has a large per-child tax deduction that gets progressively larger with the second and third child.  Mothers of two or more children are exempt from paying income taxes for the rest of their lives.  Women with three or more children can have all of their student loan debt cancelled.  Families with home mortgages can have a large portion of that debt paid by the government in proportion to the number of their children.  The government has built or renovated infant day care centers around the country, and day care costs are heavily subsidized by the government.  The government has also built "family-friendly" infrastructure in the cities, such as beautiful playgrounds and parks, where parents can take their children to play.

But as of now, it appears that all of these pro-family policies have failed to raise the fertility rate.  In 2011, when Orban first became prime minister, Hungary had Europe's lowest TFR at 1.23.  By 2021, it had risen to 1.61.  But in 2025, it was back down to 1.27--essentially, the same all-time low as in 2011.

It is possible that policies designed to incentivize having more children may have had the opposite effect.  For example, providing tax exemptions for mothers of two children might provide a work incentive for those mothers.  European women are career-minded, and giving them tax exemptions could be reinforcing the idea that they should be earning more money, which directs the mother to invest more time and energy in her career rather than in her children.

When it comes to housing, Hungary's policy of subsidizing mortgages could be increasing the demand for housing but not the supply, which creates bidding wars that make homes less affordable.

Now let's consider how Hungary compares with the United States with respect to population growth and the fertility rate.  Unlike Hungary, the population of the U.S. has been growing steadily for over a hundred years.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. has grown every year since 1900, except for one year during the Spanish flu epidemic, growing at an average of 0.85% per year since 2000.  As of today, the population of the U.S. is 342,415,867, which makes it the third largest national population in the world, behind only India and China.

This is surprising since the TFR for the U.S. is only 1.79, which is substantially higher than Hungary's 1.23, but it's still below the replacement level of 2.1.  What explains the growing population despite the below-replacement TFR is immigration.  Consider these calculations for the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau:

One birth every 9 seconds

One death every 10 seconds

One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds

Net gain of one person every 45 seconds

This shows that the mistake make by Orban's Hungary has been in limiting immigration into Hungary.  If Hungary had allowed more freedom of movement of immigrants into Hungary, comparable to that allowed by the U.S., Hungary could have had an increasing population.

Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse the century-long trend towards increasing population and bring about the sort of depopulation crisis that has afflicted Hungary.

This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.

DECLINING FREEDOM LEADS TO DECLINING POPULATION

I have pointed to two causes of Hungary's declining population--low fertility rates and low rates of immigration into Hungary.  But there's a third cause: the emigration of Hungarians out of Hungary.

According to Hungary's Central Statistical Office, a total of 367,515 Hungarians have officially left the country during the 15 years that Orban's Fidesz government has been in power.  This is actually an underestimation because foreign statistics often record nearly twice as many new arrivals from Hungary as Hungarian authorities do departures.  Another reason for this being an underestimation is that many Hungarians living abroad retain a Hungarian address.  Adjusting for these factors, there could be as many as 640,000 Hungarian emigrants who have left the country.  Notably, most of these emigrants are aged 25-49 years old--the prime age for people who could contribute to the economic and social life of Hungary.

What's most interesting about these emigrants is that prefer to emigrate to countries that rank high on the Human Freedom Index.  This should not be surprising if one recognizes, as I have argued, that countries ranking high in freedom tend to provide the best conditions for people to live good lives because they have wider opportunities for freely pursuing their happiness.

Here are the five most popular destinations for Hungarian emigrants, with their Human Freedom Index ranking in parentheses: Austria (22), Germany (17), UK (19), Netherlands (9), and Switzerland (1).

By comparison, Hungary ranks 67th out of 165 countries.  Previously, Hungary ranked much higher at 26th in 2009 the year before Orban's Fidesz came to power.  Hungary's rankings have dropped steadily during Orban's time as prime minister.

So Hungarians are voting with their feet against Orban's illiberalism and for freedom secured in a liberal social order.  Declining freedom thus leads to declining population.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF HISTORY?

This failure of Orban's illiberal Christian democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's famous argument in 1989 for "the end of history," in which human beings show their natural desire for the freedom--both economic and personal freedom--that comes from liberal democracy.

Actually, the appeal of the liberal principle of individual freedom is so powerful that even Orban cannot reject it completely.  As we've seen, Orban accepts the importance of securing that Lockean liberal conception of freedom in any good regime, although this cannot be the central organizing principle of his "illiberal state."  Consequently, Orban's "illiberal state" is not absolutely illiberal.  Someone like Rod Dreher (2023) can even defend Orban as the "guardian of liberal freedoms"!

We can see this in Hungary's rankings in the Human Freedom Index.  Under the rule of Orban's Fidesz party from 2010 to the present, Hungary's freedom ranking has fallen from 26th to 67th out of 165 countries.  But notice that a 67th ranking puts Hungary well above the world average.  Most countries rank lower.  Here are some examples of the lower ranking countries:  Mexico (91), Indonesia (92), India (110), Kuwait (113), China (149), Russia (152), and Iran (164).

If you look at how Hungary ranks in the various categories of personal freedom and economic freedom, where 10 is the highest possible score, you will see that Hungary ranks low in "rule of law" (4.9), "expression and information" (5.4), and "size of government" (6.1).  But Hungary ranks high in "freedom of movement" (9.9), "security and safety" (9.6), and "freedom in relationships" (8.8).

Thus, Orban's illiberal democracy is really very liberal, but not liberal enough for those Hungarians who have voted with their feet against Orban by leaving the country, and for those who will vote against him in the coming election.

REFERENCES

Dreher, Rod. 2023. "Orban: Guardian of Liberal Freedoms." The Critic, November.

Higgins, Andrew. 2025. "Viktor Orban's 'Propaganda State' Is Starting to Show Cracks." New York Times, October 12.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Orban, Viktor. 2014. "Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 26. Tusnadfurdo (Baile Tusnad), Romania.

Orban, Viktor. 2017. "Speech at the 2nd Budapest Demographic Forum."  May 25.

Orban, Viktor. 2018. "Speech at the 29th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 28.

The Book of Revelation Does Not Support Christian Theocracy--Douglas Wilson's Postmillennial Liberalism

In arguing for Christian nationalism, Douglas Wilson might seem to be advocating the establishment of a Christian theocracy like the Puritan theocracy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  But I have argued that careful readers of what Wilson has written about Christian nationalism will see that he never clearly advocates anything like Puritan theocracy, and he hints that he is secretly rejecting theocracy and supporting the Lockean liberalism of religious liberty and toleration.

One obvious objection to what I have said is that Wilson is very clear in embracing a postmillennial eschatology that he sees in the 20th chapter of the book of Revelation, which prophesized that Christians would someday, prior to the Second Coming, rule over the world for a thousand years; and surely this means that all nations would be under theocratic rule.

My response is to point out that when Wilson lays out his postmillennial interpretation of Revelation, he never says that the millennial rule of Christians over the world will be theocratic in the sense that Christians will take political power over all governments and use that power to coercively enforce the Mosaic law of the Old Testament.  He does say that the millennial dominance of Christianity over the world comes from the Christian evangelization of the world, which began with the preaching of the early Christians, and sometime in the near future, Christians will succeed in converting most human beings to Christianity.  But he never says that Christians will adopt the Bonaparte Option, which is the theocratic option, so that Christians will put in power "a Christian prince with some backbone, willing to knock a few heads" (FAQ, 134).  His silence suggests that his Boniface Option is simply a slightly more aggressive Benedict Option, in which Christians organize themselves into voluntary groups that promote Christianity, but without seeking the political power to coercively enforce theocratic rule over others.

MILLENNIALISM

The 20th chapter of Revelation (or the Apocalypse) is the most controversial chapter of the most controversial book in the Bible.  Like much of the Bible, Revelation is so obscure that Christians have fought over its interpretation for over 2,000 years without ever reaching agreement about what it means.  The book was written by John (perhaps the apostle John who wrote the Gospel of John), who reports a series of mystical visions that he had on the Greek island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea, in which Jesus Christ revealed to him prophecies of what was to come.

Perhaps the best survey of the leading interpretations of Revelation is Steve Gregg's Revelation/Four Views, Revised & Updated: A Parallel Commentary (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2013).  Wilson mentions this book as "an enormous help to me" in his book When the Man Comes Around: A Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2019).  Wilson thus invites his readers to compare what he says with what Gregg says; and if they do, they will see that Wilson refuses to endorse postmillennial theocracy.

There are four major views of Revelation as a whole, and three major views of the Millennium in chapter 20.  A preterist (from the Latin word praeter for "past") believes that most of the prophecies in Revelation have been fulfilled in the past--during John's life or shortly thereafter.  A historicist believes that most of the events forecast in Revelation are happening now in the present.  A futurist believes most of those events are yet to come in the future.  An idealist believes that these events are not literally true but rather they have symbolic meaning as part of a dramatic story that conveys transcendent truths, such as the conflict between Christ and Satan.

Revelation 20 is the only chapter of the Bible that speaks of the 1,000-year reign of the saints on the Earth that is commonly called the Millennium.  This chapter raises one of the ultimate questions of the Bible--whether, how, and when God's kingdom is established on the Earth.

The three major approaches to interpreting Revelation 20 are distinguished by how they determine the timing of the Millennium in relation to the Second Coming of Christ.  The premillennialists say that Christ will return before the Millennium, and thus Christ will directly rule over this thousand-year reign of the saints on Earth.  

The postmillennialists say that Christ will return after the Millennium, and thus the millennial reign of the saints on Earth will be the fulfillment of the original gospel mission of the Christian Church to evangelize the whole world.  

The amillennialists say that there is no millennium if it's understood as the literal rule of the saints for a golden age of 1,000 years, because Revelation 20 should be understood symbolically or spiritually as the ultimate victory of the Christian Church in propagating Christianity, with the 1,000 years understood symbolically as the entire period from the First Coming of Christ to His Second Coming.

Wilson identifies himself as a preterist and a postmillennialist.  As a preterist, he believes that most of what is prophesized in Revelation was concerned with events of the first century.  John says that the Revelation of Jesus Christ that appeared to him in his visions was "to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass" (1:1).  Surely, Wilson insists, "shortly come to pass" must mean that most of the events foretold were to happen either during John's lifetime or shortly thereafter.  

But still, as a postmillennialist, Wilson is a futurist in seeing that the Christianization of all or most of the world must lie sometime in the future, perhaps a few hundred years from now, but before the Second Coming. 

Revelation 20 begins with John reporting:

Then I saw an angel coming down from Heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.  He laid hold of the dragon, that serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; and he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal on him, so that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years were finished.  But after these things he must be released for a little while (Rev. 20:1-3).

According to Wilson, the binding of Satan with a chain is a metaphorical way of saying that he will no longer have the power to deceive the nations the way he had previously.  He will not be able to prevent the evangelization of the Roman Empire and then over the centuries the evangelization of the whole world.  "Looking at the nations of men, he no longer has the run of the place.  Rather, preachers of the gospel have the run of the place, and he can do nothing to stop them" (231). The one thousand years of Satan's binding is a symbolic image of the age of the Christian Church from the time of Pentecost to the Second Coming.

John continues:

And I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was committed to them.  Then I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their witness to Jesus and for the word of God, who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received his mark on their foreheads or on their hands.  And they lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.  But the rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were finished.  This is the first resurrection.  Blessed and holy is he who was part in the first resurrection.  Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years (Rev. 20:4-6).

Wilson says the thrones that John saw are located in Heaven.  The souls of the Christian martyrs have ascended into Heaven, and there they participate in the spiritual rule of the world, in and through Christ (233).  They are the priests of God and Christ who reign with God a thousand years.  

By the "first resurrection" John means the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the second resurrection is the general resurrection of the dead at the end of all human history. Christians participate in the resurrection of Jesus because "every believer who is truly converted throughout all church history is made a partaker of the resurrection of Jesus, the first resurrection" (234). 

That Christians reign with God for a thousand years refers to the progressive victory of the gospel in the world from the time of the early church to the end of history.  Eventually, over time the vast majority of human beings will be converted, and that's why Wilson is optimistic that in the near future all nations will be Christian nations, because most of their people will be Christians.  The world will become Christianized by through the persuasiveness of the gospel.

And yet, if you read Gregg's book, you will see that some postmillennialists--particularly, the Christian Reconstructionists like Rousas John Rushdooney--say that persuading people to voluntarily convert to Christianity is not enough to create Christian nations.  In addition to preaching the gospel, Christians need to take political power so that they can use governments to coercively enforce the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament: Christian nations must become Christian theocracies.

But in his commentary on Revelation, Wilson says nothing about this; and his careful readers can see this silence as evidence that he cannot endorse theocracy because he is committed to the Lockean liberalism of religious liberty and toleration.

THE OBSCURITY OF REVELATION DICTATES RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Wilson might respond by saying that he cannot endorse theocracy as taught by the book of Revelation because that book does not teach that--or at least not clearly enough that all Christians can agree that that is what Revelation teaches.  But, as I have argued in previous posts, that's the fundamental problem in taking the Bible as God's revelation of His truth--it's so obscure that Christians cannot agree on what it means--particularly, in its eschatology, in its teaching about what lies at the end of human history and in the afterlife (Heaven and Hell).

Moreover, that the Bible is so obscure that even devout Christians cannot agree on its meaning casts doubt on whether the Bible is a true revelation from God.  In John 17, Jesus prays to God that all believers will be as one, that they will come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians would give witness to the truth of revelation by showing their agreement about that revelation.  But if they cannot come to agreement, then the world can rightly doubt that the Bible is a true revelation.

This is certainly true for the Christian disagreement over the meaning of the Millennium in Revelation 20.  For example, the early Christian apologist and philosopher Justin Martyr (100-165 AD) was a premillennialist, but he respected the opinions of those many true Christians who disagreed with him.  In his Dialogue with Trypho, he wrote:

I and many others are of this opinion [premillennialism], and believe that such will take place, as you assuredly are aware; but on the other hand, I signified to you that many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise (Gregg, 49).

 This shows the reality of religious pluralism--or as Locke said, "Every man is orthodox to himself," and "Every church is orthodox to itself."  And that shows the need for religious liberty rather than theocracy.

"WE NEED GOD'S WORD FOR IT"

Remember where we started with my first post on Wilson.  We saw that Wilson's conception of Christian nationalism assumes a Divine Command Theory of ethics--that the only standard of right and wrong is the command of God: whatever God commands to be done is right, and whatever God commands not to be done is wrong.  Wilson explains:

Christian nationalism is the belief that human societies require a transcendent anchor to hold all our cultural, political, and social assumptions in place, and that this transcendent anchor should be the true and living God, not an idol.

All ethical judgments, in order to be ethical judgments, rely on some form of "Thus saith the Lord."  Otherwise, they are not ethical judgments at all, but rather the opinions of some guy. . . . If we want a standard for right and wrong--regardless of whether that standard is going to be applied to a next-door neighbor or to Congress--we need God's word for it.

But how do we know what "God's word" is?  Do we read John's reports of his mystical visions on the island of Patmos?  But how do we know that his mystical visions were true revelations from God?  Even if we assume that they were true revelations, how can we be sure that we have correctly interpreted his often obscure writing?

Should we rely on Wilson's commentary on John's book to give us the correct interpretation?  We notice, however, that Wilson's commentary is full of "I take it that . . ." and "I believe that . . ."

So, finally, what we have is not "God's word" but "the opinions of some guy."