Former US President Trump says that his lawyers will ask for a recusal of the judge on his election fraud case.

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.”