Continental Europe with its history of monarchies and imperial rule lacks a strong tradition of Enlightenment liberalism. But America has such a tradition and conservatives have been among its guardians. As Hayek famously noted, “what in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.”

Inevitably, then, to become a conservative in the European sense means abandoning American traditions. But why are American conservatives turning their backs on what makes America America?

One major reason: Because they feel that playing according to liberal democracy’s rules is a loser’s game in the culture war. The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, who has been camped at an Orbán-funded think tank in Budapest since the spring and was responsible for facilitating Carlson’s jaunt, admits as much. “The unhappy truth is that liberalism as we Americans have known it is probably dead,” he wrote in a piece comparing Carlson’s Hungary trip to President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, except that Nixon was an advocate of liberal democracy to an authoritarian country and Carlson is an apostle of authoritarianism to America. “Our future is almost certainly going to be left-illiberal or right-illiberal.”

But the fact is that whatever the excesses of left-liberalism (and they certainly exist), to the extent that it is fighting for human rights and social justice, it is trying to atone for America’s past lapses from its own liberalism while extending its promise.