W

hen in the spring of 2017 Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, made it illegal for the Central European University to offer U.S.-accredited degrees at its Budapest campus, everyone there knew that this was more than an attack on George Soros, the Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist who’d founded the CEU. I was then the university’s president and rector, posts I held from 2016 to 2021, so I witnessed the more than 50,000 citizens of Budapest who marched past our windows one Sunday a few weeks later in defense of our academic freedom. Chanting “Szabad orszag, szabad egyetem” (“Free country, free university”), they knew that their freedom was at stake too. Since coming to power in 2010, Orbán had neutered the country’s supreme court, rewritten Hungary’s constitution, radically curtailed the free press, and stigmatized foreign donations to its civil-society organizations. The chanting crowds knew that the attack on the university was another step in the consolidation of single-party authoritarian rule.

Orbán’s campaign against universities didn’t end with the CEU. First, he decapitated Hungary’s preeminent scientific institution, the Academy of Science, stripping it of its independent research institutes. Then he forced the privatization of a large part of Hungary’s own university system, packing its governing boards with party loyalists and pouring resources into the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a new elite institution with the explicit task of providing a traditional and patriotic education for the Hungarian elite of tomorrow.

[From the June 2019 issue: Viktor Orbán’s war on intellect]

A larger project of geostrategic realignment was at work here. Having thrown out a U.S.-accredited institution, Orbán tried to replace it by offering a campus site on the Danube to Fudan University, a Shanghai-based institution that has recently acknowledged in its statutes the leading role of the Chinese Communist Party. He also took steps to distance himself further from NATO and the European Union.

As a young prodemocracy activist in 1989, Orbán was among the first to call for the repatriation of Soviet troops from Hungary. Three decades later, he has been an outlier among the leaders of NATO and EU member countries for his pro-Russian stance. Slow to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Orbán has urged Ukrainians to seek a peace deal and barred arms shipments across the Hungarian border that would aid the Ukrainian war effort.

Instead of balking at Orbán’s courtship of autocrats or his eviction of a higher-education institution with U.S. accreditation, the Trump administration and its ambassador in Budapest offered only token resistance to the attack on the CEU, seemingly on the principle that any enemy of Soros had to be a friend of theirs. Since 2019, foreign conservatives have been flocking to Budapest to sit at the feet of the Hungarian master. Some of them, such as Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, just seem naive. Ostensibly seeking closer international ties between parties of the right, they seem to want to believe that, like them, he is a constitutional conservative—when he is, in fact, the authoritarian boss of a one-party state.

Others know exactly who he is, and that’s what attracts them: his despotic machismo. The list of American supplicants to the Orbán court includes political figures such as Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson, and right-wing intellectuals such as Rod Dreher, Christopher Rufo, and Patrick Deneen. The U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference has held one of its meetings in Budapest, and Orbán was invited to be a keynote speaker at the group’s conference in Dallas last year.

[Bernard-Henry Lévy: How an anti-totalitarian militant discovered ultranationalism]

American conservatives are not alone in harkening to the music from Budapest. Orbán’s systematic dismantling of liberal institutions in Hungary has made him the titular head of a global national-conservative movement, which currently includes Giorgia Meloni of Italy, Marine Le Pen of France, Santiago Abascal of the Vox party in Spain, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland’s Law and Justice party, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud in Israel, the far-right Sweden Democrats party, and now America’s MAGA Republicans. Each of these right-wing populists takes what they like from Orbán’s menu. Among its ingredients are a fantasy theory that liberals rule the world, a values campaign that denies gay men and women a place in the family, and protectionist economic policies that transfer public assets to party insiders. Add to this one-party rule that dismantles checks and balances, a politics that defines all opponents as enemies of the nation, and a vision of cultural struggle that identifies schools and universities as a crucial battleground for the control of future generations.

All together, this has made an intoxicating cocktail for 21st-century conservatives. The conservative task, Orbán proclaims, is nothing less than reversing the decline of the West. The hour is late. Godless liberalism, hedonism, permissiveness, and cosmopolitanism have done their fatal work. Decadence is at an advanced stage. At a party gathering in July, he thundered, “Today, ‘Western values’ mean three things: migration, LGBTQ, and war.” The idea that Western values might also include helping a democracy repel an invasion is as foreign to Orbán as it is to some far-right American conservatives.

The Germans have a word for this: Kulturkampf. Orbán’s appeal to American conservatives is that he understands politics as a struggle for cultural hegemony. It may be odd to think of American conservatives becoming followers of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who made winning hegemony central to his conception of political strategy, but they share a view of universities as axes of influence. Whoever has cultural hegemony, they believe, will secure political hegemony.

This is a far-fetched idea, by the way. Does anyone, of whatever political stripe, have any hope of exercising cultural hegemony in a country as wildly, exuberantly varied and divided as America? Nevertheless, the goal of cultural hegemony appears to be what drives Governor Ron DeSantis’s focus on gaining control of the Florida education system; rewriting the school curriculum on Black studies and other subjects; firing diversity, equity, and inclusion officers; and giving university trustees the power to review and dismiss tenured faculty in the state system. It also explains the importance DeSantis attaches to his recent takeover of New College, a respectable but little-noticed liberal-arts institution in Sarasota. In January, he packed the board of trustees with his appointees, who imposed a new management team, and dismissed the president—all in service of reinventing the institution as a Christian conservative bastion in his battle against “woke” ideology.

Why would a Republican presidential candidate waste political capital shaking up a small liberal-arts college, and how have universities’ curricula and administration become another battleground for the soul of America? Unlike former President Donald Trump, who doesn’t seem to care much about these issues, DeSantis seems obsessed with controlling the sector—betting everything on this struggle for cultural hegemony.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

In this regard, he is Orbán’s disciple. In Budapest, the CEU was a small, research-oriented social-science and humanities graduate school—hardly a thorn in the side of the Orbán regime, you might think. But that would be to misunderstand how Orbán saw us. To him, our university made a valuable symbolic target in his effort to fashion himself as a conservative culture warrior, fighting back the supposedly tentacular influence of liberal cosmopolitanism. Once universities are framed in this way, they become irresistibly attractive to self-promoting demagogues.

Universities have another crucial feature: They are vulnerable to populist attack. New College in Florida is a small institution, with loyal alumni to be sure, but hardly a powerhouse of political clout. It’s the kind of institution that would have had Stalin ask, archly, How many divisions does it have? The same was true of the CEU. It had some cultural capital, as George Soros’s émigré legacy in Eastern Europe, but Orbán realized that the CEU, as a small American-accredited institution operating in a foreign country with a growing but modest alumni base, was a sitting duck. These demagogues are too clever to pick a fight with someone their own size.

For this sort of right-wing populist, attacking colleges and universities also mobilizes the resentments of people who never went to university and may dislike, often justly, the entitlement that a college degree can confer on its beneficiaries. If a crucial component of the Trump-era Republican electorate comprises people who may not have graduated from high school, then an attack on universities is pure gravy for the demagogue. Similarly, for these angry voters, the downside of such an attack—weakening the scientific, technical, and cultural innovation that universities make possible—does not carry much weight.

[Jacob Heilbrunn: Behind the American right’s fascination with Viktor Orbán]

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Kulturkampf attacks on universities are both definitional, in the sense of the leader’s brand, and diversionary. If a leader were serious about addressing the resentments of an excluded voter base, he wouldn’t focus on universities at all. Instead, he’d take a hard look at the power of corporations, their tax rates and tax avoidance, and their offshoring of jobs, not to mention their overwhelming control of the digital public sphere. That leader would look at the incomes of the richest citizens and see what could be done to transfer some of that wealth to improve schools, hospitals, clinics, and other public goods that give people, especially those without a college education, a fair start in life. But it’s so much easier to target universities and their supposedly cosseted liberal professors than to tackle the perquisites and power of the corporate-donor class that funds his campaigns.

Orbán is a master of such diversionary politics, happily courting liberals’ denunciations for his attacks on academic freedom while patiently getting on with his core business—which is to use state power to enrich his supporters. He once confessed to a friend of mine, a banker, that he had a lot of mouths to feed: He knows, as do other autocrats such as Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that feeding friends is how authoritarians hold on to power.

Six years after Viktor Orbán started his campaign against the CEU, the conservatives who imitate him have grasped how convenient it is to make universities your enemy. These attacks on university autonomy and academic freedom—in U.S. states, in Narendra Modi’s India, and in Erdoğan’s Turkey—are principally about one thing: systematically weakening any institution that may act as an obstacle to authoritarian power. Although American conservatives, no less than their autocratic counterparts abroad, consistently portray their attacks on universities in pseudo-democratic terms—as attempts to protect the silent majority from the ideological hectoring of the liberal elite—their real agenda is to weaken democratic checks and balances.

Universities are not usually understood, and even more rarely defended, as guardrail institutions that keep a democracy from succumbing to the tyranny of the majority, but that is one of their roles: to test, criticize, and validate the knowledge that citizens use to make decisions about who should rule them. Because this is the universities’ democratic rationale, the message for those who want to defend them should be clear. So long as academic freedom is considered a privilege of a liberal elite, it has no constituency beyond academia. Liberals should defend academic freedom not as the privilege of a profession, nor to preserve universities as bastions of progressive opinion, but because universities—like courts, a free press, and independent regulatory bodies—are essential restraints on majoritarian rule that keep us all free. That was precisely what the citizens of Budapest understood when they marched past the CEU’s doors, chanting, “Free country, free university.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Atlantic associate editor Morgan Ome. Morgan recently reported on the ripple effects of the U.S. government’s reparations program for Japanese Americans, and recommended five books that’ll fit right into your busy schedule. She’s also investigated the trend of “demon screaming” at concerts. Morgan has been watching a surrealist Boots Riley satire, revisiting Mitski’s “pithy, poetic” lyrics as she awaits the singer’s next album, and recovering from the heartbreak of an Eileen Chang novel about star-crossed lovers in 1930s Shanghai.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The misunderstood reason millions of Americans stopped going to church A strike scripted by Netflix The most misunderstood concept in psychology

The Culture Survey: Morgan Ome

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’ll watch anything by the writer-director Boots Riley, who made the absurdist, anti-capitalist 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. His latest project is the seven-episode series I’m a Virgo, which follows 19-year-old Cootie, a 13-foot-tall Black man who is kept hidden from the world by his family until he escapes and explores his hometown of Oakland. Jharrel Jerome plays Cootie with a sweet earnestness that helps balance the over-the-top satire and surrealistic visual effects.

I’m also keeping up with the second season of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which holds a lot of nostalgic value for me. I read Jenny Han’s series in middle school, and I remember asking my mom to drive me to Barnes & Noble to get the second book when it came out. The new season deals with the ways that death and grief shape love, and it’s more somber and less frothy than the first season.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Half a Lifelong Romance, by Eileen Chang (translated by Karen S. Kingsbury), broke my heart in the same way that the film Past Lives did. Chang’s novel follows star-crossed lovers, but perhaps more interestingly, it explores the way that family, class, and social norms in 1930s Shanghai mold two people over the course of 14 years.  In the novel’s introduction, Kingsbury writes that the Chinese title’s more literal translation is “fated to share only half a lifetime,” which “evokes both lifelong attachment and a sudden sundering.” How devastating, and how beautiful!

In nonfiction, I loved the audiobook of How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing, by KC Davis. At a basic level, the book gives practical advice on how to get chores done during difficult periods of life. But Davis also makes the argument for removing shame and judgment from care tasks such as laundry, cooking, and cleaning—failure to do these things doesn’t mean failure as a person. [Related: The juicy secrets of everyday life]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “We’re in Love,” by boygenius, is the song I want to send to all of my loved ones. It’s the tenderest ode to friendship. (That Lucy Dacus wrote this for her bandmates, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, makes me weak inside.)

On the loud end, whenever I’m mad, I queue up “UGH!,” by BTS, which is an angry song about … anger. This explainer breaks down the Korean lyrics, which are full of wordplay and idioms.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Sad girls and Mitski. Name a more iconic duo—I’ll wait. With her new album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, coming out next month, I’ve been revisiting Mitski’s discography, which holds new meaning on each listen. I’m obsessed with her refrains: They can be lamenting, as in “Two Slow Dancers,” in which she mournfully croons, “To think that we could stay the same,” or joyful, as in “Nobody,” in which that word crescendoes and builds into a dance-y tempo. Her lyrics meld the visceral and the abstract in such pithy, poetic ways—a “washing-machine heart,” a body “made of crushed little stars”—and have this uncanny ability to describe feelings that I previously didn’t have the words for. Whether she is writing about her relationships with people or with her art, Mitski has given me solace and permission to sit with my own messy and complicated emotions. [Related: The dangerous desires in Mitski’s songs]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Since it was published, I haven’t been able to put Hanna Rosin’s 2015 cover story, “The Silicon Valley Suicides,” out of my head. It is an empathetic and deeply reported article that explores why so many Palo Alto high-school students have killed themselves. The story delves into the academic pressure and pains of adolescence that so many young people face, while acknowledging that there are some questions that don’t have straightforward answers.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I stumbled across John Akomfrah’s Purple at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C., and was completely mesmerized by the video-art installation playing across six large panels. Sitting on a beanbag chair, I watched archival film of factory workers and coal miners juxtaposed with scenes of breathtaking wilderness around the world. When I emerged from the dark room, I appreciated how the installation had captured the loss and anxiety brought on by environmental devastation and the climate crisis, while still allowing me to cherish and admire our planet.

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: My favorite paintings, Chiura Obata’s Evening Glow at Mono Lake and Paul Klee’s Blossoms in the Night, evoke serenity and are just plain gorgeous.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: The simple rhymes in “Harlem,” by Langston Hughes, make it perfect for memorizing and keeping in the back of your mind, and the question it asks—“What happens to a dream deferred?”—makes me return to it again and again.

A good recommendation I recently received: While having dinner with an old friend in June, I lamented that our hometown has become less and less recognizable over the years. I missed the many places of our childhood that no longer exist, I told her. “Do you listen to Noah Kahan?” she asked. I shook my head. “I think you’ll like his latest album,” she told me. I’ve played the album, Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever), on loop ever since. Kahan is reminiscent of The Lumineers and Bon Iver; his lyrics have Taylor Swift’s specific-yet-universal quality, and his voice strains just enough to convey angst and yearning. The album’s closer, an extended version of “The View Between Villages,” starts off slow before swelling into a cathartic chorus that captures the melancholy of honoring the people and places who represent our past. Listening to Kahan’s album feels like looking up and seeing my childhood self in the back seat of a car, driving past me. I wave to her, and she waves back.

The Week Ahead

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a murder mystery by the author James McBride, begins with a skeleton found at the bottom of a well (on sale Tuesday). The third season of Only Murders in the Building, a comedy series about three Upper West Side neighbors who bond over their love of true crime, begins streaming on Hulu this Tuesday. Heart of Stone, a new movie featuring Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan, follows an intelligence operative as she tries to stop a hacker (streaming on Netflix this Friday).

Essay

Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Putting Trump on the Couch

By Scott Stossel

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association established the so-called Goldwater Rule as a response to the many mental-health professionals who had ventured glib and florid diagnoses of Senator Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign. “I believe Goldwater has the same pathological makeup as Hitler, Castro, Stalin, and other known schizophrenic leaders” was a representative comment; many other psychiatrists and psychologists deemed him schizophrenic, a “megalomaniac,” and “chronically psychotic.” In the four decades between its enshrining and the 2016 election, the Goldwater Rule—which prohibits psychiatrists from issuing diagnoses of public figures they haven’t seen as patients—was mostly honored.

But from the earliest moments of Donald Trump’s campaign, his behavior, falling far outside the boundaries of conventional candidate comportment, raised the question of whether he could be adequately assessed in purely political terms. Where did politics end and psychology—or psychopathology—begin?

Read the full article.

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The surprising profundity of The Righteous Gemstones A movie about an affair that breaks with convention The actor who documented his grief—and shared it with the world The end of the U.S. women’s soccer dominance Kokomo City sees its subjects for who they are. Life has always been a performance. Dear Therapist: My husband had a relationship with his best friend. Poem: “After Viewing The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne (1847)”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers Why a U.S. women’s team loss might actually be a good thing

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A stork perches on a tree branch as the moon rises near the Hamzabey Dam, in Turkey. (Alper Tuydes / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

A trampoline championship in England; a flooded St. Mark’s Square, in Venice; and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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