THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The Left's nervous breakdown began in February 1956, with Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, titled "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," Khrushchev revealed to the world many of the Stalin regime's crimes. But Soviet Russia's crimes would not end with Stalin: Before the year's end, Khrushchev himself would order tanks into Hungary to suppress the Budapest uprising--described by the Communist Party as a "fascist counter-revolution." In fact, it was a student-led workers' rebellion against Hungary's Soviet government.

Much like Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022--also based on false accusations of "fascism"--the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 was predicated on a strategic miscalculation. Soviet troops "expected a police action," as Hobsbawm puts it, but instead "found themselves faced with a revolution, which quickly spread from Budapest to the rest of the country." Rather than giving way to a superior military power, "brave and ingenious urban guerrillas succeeded in fighting to a standstill Soviet troops," before being ruthlessly suppressed by another onslaught of Soviet troops in early November.

The invasion--which killed thousands of Hungarians and forced hundreds of thousands more to flee the country--compelled the Soviet Union's western apologists to come to grips with the imperialist ambitions of this totalitarian regime. Besides its geopolitical consequences, the events of fall 1956 fractured and ultimately transformed not just the British communist party but the politics of the Left in the West more generally. [...]

Conservatives in the West have always had an ambivalent relationship with liberalism, seeking a balance between rights and responsibilities, individualism and community, tradition and progress. During the Cold War, however, this precarious balance was stabilized by a common enemy, Soviet communism, in contrast to which political and economic liberalism appealed even to those traditionalists who might otherwise be wary of liberalism's underlying principles. Yet, with the exhaustion of Cold War ideologies, and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the fissures within this "fusionist" agenda became apparent once again. 

Since 2016, many of those affiliated with "post-liberalism," "national conservatism," and "the New Right" have come to believe that the Right's association with liberalism was a Faustian bargain. Liberalism, on this telling, is a totalizing force that, in its inexorable expansion outwards, erodes community and tradition, leaving a hollowed-out polity of atomized individuals bound together by nothing but procedural norms that masquerade as morally neutral. Traditional conservative principles such as prudence, moderation, and devolved authority are no match against this Leviathan, so that strength, national identity, and even centralized, federal action come to be seen as necessary bulwarks against liberalism, Left or Right. 

In this context, it is no surprise that some politicians, pundits, and intellectuals affiliated with the New Right have come to see such nationalist strong men as Viktor Orban or even Vladimir Putin as fellow travelers. They applaud these leaders' willingness to "stand up" against the moral perversities of liberalism--Orban champions what he calls "illiberal democracy"--and unabashedly defend their countries' own national interests against the liberal cosmopolitanism they see embodied in the European Union and NATO. Thus, in the days and hours leading up to the Ukrainian invasion, Steve Bannon praised Putin for being "anti-woke," while Tucker Carlson opined that Putin posed no threat to Americans and characterized the tensions between Russia and Ukraine as a "border dispute." 

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