The Hungarian prime minister makes for an odd champion of American-style Christendom. Abortion is uncontroversially legal in Hungary, the people aren’t particularly religious, and Orbán has exercised kleptocratic control over churches that dare to dissent from his policies. Dreher’s contention that “Orban protects European Christianity better than Pope Francis” notwithstanding, the key reason for trad-con attraction to the Carpathian nationalist is that he fights the right enemies (globalists, the media, liberalism, George Soros) and wins elections. “We are inoculated against the woke virus in Central Europe,” Orbán bragged at the Demographic Summit, ever aware of what words please conservative American ears in 2021.

By prioritizing culture war pugilism, the Magyarphilic American right has turned a blind eye not only to Orbán’s own considerable corruptions but to many of its own erstwhile principles. Like virtually all European nationalists, Orbán is a pro-welfare-state mercantilist, intervening early and often in economic activity, centralizing the federal government’s power, and doling out favors to friends and family. Partly as a result, Hungary, which as recently as 1993 led the entire post–Warsaw Pact bloc in per capita gross domestic product, now sits at the bottom with the also-nationalist-run Poland, while the Baltics and the former Czechoslovakia zoom ahead.

Hungary’s brand of nationalism generates not just cronyist domestic policy but tawdry foreign policy as well.