With his party’s landslide loss in the recent Hungarian elections, Viktor Orbán is out of power after 16 years. According to commentators on the establishment American right, Orbán’s loss is the death knell for “postliberalism” and possibly the end of Vice President JD Vance’s political career.

Those most strenuous in their criticisms of the postliberals have openly claimed that the Hungarian election will decide the fate of American conservatism. Two, James Patterson and Thomas Howes, have already declared in a forthcoming book the “failure” of postliberalism. Patterson argues that Orbán’s loss is an opportunity to curb the influence of right-wing subversives.

In an article for Civitas Outlook, Howes declares victory over the postliberals, yet his own meandering article showcases the shallowness of his analysis. At once, the essay makes clear that Vance is the real object of his ire, with Howes claiming that if Vance is “the Catholic postliberal movement’s last hope, this does not inspire much confidence.” Yet Howes also throws in Heritage President Kevin Roberts and conservative activist Christopher Rufo alongside more philosophically determined postliberals like Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Patrick Deneen, while simultaneously claiming that Elon Musk’s DOGE project was the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, who is somehow included in this nebulous grouping.

The tactics exhibited are a persistent theme in these sorts of “anti-postliberal” screeds, the object of which is apparently to pair a defense of small “l” liberalism with a call to rid the American right of all undesired dissenters.

Howes and Patterson are not alone in the ambition to use Orbán’s political loss as an opportunity for a domestic purge. In an attack on Rod Dreher, Cathy Young of the Bulwark declared that the “rightwing fanboys (and fangirls) were hardest hit by Orbán’s loss.” Kevin Williamson of the Dispatch, with his characteristic snark, said he felt “a terrible disturbance in the Force, as though hundreds of American right-wingers living in really nice apartments in Budapest suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly unemployed.”

As Michael Brendan Dougherty points out, Orbán’s time in power was primarily about the issue of sovereignty, and he was offensive to the world of progressivism not because of his postliberalism but because of his efforts to disrupt the “traditional nexus of progressive power run through academia, media, progressive NGOs, and the judiciary.” Orbán, as Dougherty argues, went the furthest in trying to “replicate the progressive nexus, but along conservative lines.” For example, he points to Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an academic institution crafted by Orbán’s Fidesz Party government to compete with George Soros’s Central European University. As Dougherty rightfully suggests, it is illuminating that the anti-Orbánists on the right “cheer the potential shutdown of these, as part of the broader fight against corrupt statism” in which most conservatives in the West are overly conditioned by the enormous and almost universal progressive NGO system.  

What is particularly fascinating about Dougherty’s description is how much it sounds like the activity of mid-century American conservative heroes, most notably William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s first trio of books—God and Man at Yale, McCarthy and His Enemies, and Up From Liberalism—were primarily about contesting liberal conformity and hegemony in politics and culture. As Buckley, along with his co-author and brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., put it in McCarthy and His Enemies, the idea that the United States was in the “grip of a reign of terror” under McCarthy’s investigation was combined with unwarranted charges against the right of “reaction,” “fascism,” “anti-Semitism,” “chauvinism,” and “warmongering.” Such familiar charges, however, reflected a new conformity or orthodoxy, or sanctions imposed on people to discourage certain activities.

Today’s establishment right has taken on none of those lessons and has preferred only one part of the narrative of the creation of the conservative movement—the necessity of purges. For these commentators, the Hungarian election and the defeat of Orbán have little to do with ongoing European politics or even the particulars of Orbán’s postliberal program. Rather, it is a blunt tool used to divest and divorce the movement from its purported ideological enemies and, in this case, anyone who is not committed to classical liberalism as the only available American tradition. They are “right liberals” in that they conclude that to be an American conservative is to act to conserve the liberal tradition and the liberal order.

In McCarthy and His Enemies, Buckley and Bozell noted that the liberal enemies of “McCarthyism” were disturbed by any orthodoxy or conformity, insisting that McCarthyism was bad because it obstructed the “free flow of commerce in the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” The duo thought it was well and good to be concerned with protecting “freedom of the mind,” but reminded their readers that the idea of opposing any sort of conformity arose from a “failure to understand the ways, of society, a failure to recognize that some conformity, in varying degrees and in diverse fields, has characterized every society known to man.” That is, liberals wrongly and dangerously believed in absolute freedom of mind in a way that condemned the natural processes of society and formulated an inflexible doctrine.

The case made by Buckley and Bozell, in accordance with the ideas of their Yale mentor Willmoore Kendall, was that ultimately our political society can act to preserve its existence and to protect its public orthodoxy against its known and stated enemies. The “marketplace of ideas,” a fundamentally liberal notion, gave way to the most crucial aim of defending public order. That orthodoxy was not the product of temporary public tumult and ephemeral political winds, but hundreds of years of sentiment and development. It was not, as Buckley and Bozell put it, made by “spontaneous consent.” It is that American tradition, not reflexively limited to classical and Lockean liberalism, which can justly be defended and preserved against subversive enemies.

Months ago, the Daniel McCarthy correctly identified in The Spectator the “plot against JD Vance.” It is not a surprise that many of the same people and institutions are making a charge now against postliberalism as a means to drive their more counterrevolutionary conservative enemies out. Vice President Vance identified as himself among the “postliberal right” in 2023 (apparently inspired by Deneen, according to Politico), but he has not acted consistently in a way that rejects the maxims and norms of the liberal order. Vance includes himself among them because he thinks experience has proven that liberalism has failed to address the most pressing issues in American life—the erosion of the family, the increased radicalism of the left in education and culture, the affordability crisis, immigration, and the social costs of atomized individualism.

Postliberalism, ill-defined and capricious as it is, represents what Orbán offered his supporters on the American right—a conservative politician using energetic government to address the grave social and political ailments of the West. The underlying tension and debate on the right is not new, however. It goes to the telos of any political society and the notion among many postliberals, as well as the broader so-called New Right, that the highest good is not individual liberty, limited government, autonomy, or the rule of law, but the preservation of a moral and social order and compact which cultivates man towards virtue. What’s more, these ill-intentioned attempts to purge elements of the American right as supposed subversives operate without any clear understanding of the previous leaders of the conservative movement but in conformity with their (and our) liberal enemies.