Where the leninist left once hoped to accelerate history, the right’s political pilgrims aim to reverse it—restoring an idealized past of ethnic homogeneity, traditionalist ideas of family and religion, and pre-democratic social hierarchy. These conservatives are entranced by Orbán’s bombast about defending a “Christian nation” against a Muslim invasion from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“Lacking any understanding of the languages, histories, or actual beliefs of the citizens of authoritarian regimes, conservatives—like the leftists who admired the Soviet Union—see what they want to see,” Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the modern Republican Party, told me, “and choose not to think about the monstrosities that would accompany the imposition of that model on the United States.”

This is the guiding spirit of a new movement on the political right, the self-described national conservatives who first emerged in 2019 and enjoy funding from moguls such as Peter Thiel. Among other things, the “NatCons,” as they are known, seek to detach nationalism from fascism, a task that one of the group’s champions, Yoram Hazony, undertook in his specious book The Virtue of Nationalism. At a NatCon conference in Rome in 2020, Christopher DeMuth, the former president of the American Enterprise Institute, conducted a public interview with Orbán himself, introducing the Hungarian strongman as “boldly at the forefront. He is not only a political but an intellectual leader.” A NatCon 3 conference in Miami is scheduled for September, where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who is casting himself as an American Orbán with his culture-war crusade against woke liberals, LGBTQ topics in local schools, and freedom of speech at colleges and universities—will be among the main speakers.

America’s new national conservatives are looking to fulfill an old dream—of taking strength from an autocrat abroad to rule without restraint at home. As Orwell understood, when they see someone wielding the whip, they want to get their hands on it.