One consequence of America's retreat from global leadership has been damage to the idea of political and economic liberty world-wide. Political scientists call this "democratic backsliding"—the erosion of liberal institutions in states that had recently transitioned to democracy, though a better term might be authoritarian recidivism.
Consider the striking comments by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. "I don't think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations," Mr. Orban said in a speech earlier this week. He went on to cite Russia, Turkey and China as successful models to emulate, "none of which is liberal and some of which aren't even democracies."
Mr. Orban entered politics as an anti-Communist in the 1980s and once identified as a liberal in the 19th-century sense of the word. Yet since returning to power in 2010—he first served as premier from 1998 to 2002—he has chipped away at the country's constitutional checks and balances. He has packed courts and other independent institutions with loyalists from his ruling Fidesz party, politicized the central bank, nationalized private pensions, and barred the media from delivering "unbalanced news coverage."
The same period has witnessed the rise in Hungary of Jobbik, an explicitly neo-Nazi party. Jobbik's leaders have called on the government to count the Jews in parliament, proposed to set up "criminal zones" outside cities to segregate and surveil Roma residents, and erected a statue in Budapest honoring Miklos Horthy (1868-1957), the military leader who allied Hungary with Nazi Germany. Fidesz has often abetted and amplified, rather than confronted, Jobbik's ugly politics.
Many of these developments are attributable to Hungary's painful post-Communist transition. As elsewhere in Europe, slow growth, joblessness and economic mismanagement by parties of the center-left and center-right have been a boon to extremists and would-be authoritarians. "Liberal democracy can't remain globally competitive," Mr. Orban said.
Hungary's slow-motion transformation into a soft-authoritarian state may appear to Washington and Brussels as a provincial concern on Europe's periphery. Yet Mr. Orban looks with admiration to Vladimir Putin —and harbors Putin-like aspirations. Hungary has in recent years granted citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring states, and the goal of resurrecting a Greater Hungary stretching beyond the country's post-World War I borders is no fantasy for many nationalist elites.
More broadly, Mr. Orban's illiberal candor is a warning that free markets and free societies need more forceful defending. The West's victory in the Cold War led to a complacency that the liberal idea was triumphant—that it was "the end of history," in the fashionable phrase of the day. But authoritarians are always lurking to seize on democratic weakness.
Western Europe needs to set a better example of what freedom can achieve by reviving economic growth, and the American President who ostensibly still leads the free world ought to break his pattern and speak up on behalf of the liberal idea as if he believes it. If President Obama won't do it, then those who want to be his successor should.
