The "Globo-Homo Complex" comes for Viktor Orban
JD Vance's (unsuccessful) postliberal pilgrimage to Hungary
Welcome to the The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.
The Verdict
Earlier this week, the vice president flew to Budapest and campaigned openly for autocrat Viktor Orban: leading rally chants, calling Trump on speakerphone for the crowd, and calling the Hungarian leader “one of the only true statesmen in Europe.”
Despite these efforts, today, Hungarians rejected Orban and his nationalist party. The incoming prime minister, Peter Magyar, celebrated his victory: “We have liberated Hungary and taken back our country.”
Liberated Hungary from what? The very forces that brought Vance to Budapest. They have been struck a blow, but don’t count them out. Economic historian Phil Magness traced the shadowy intellectual movement behind Vance’s pilgrimage. It started with a political scientist who fled Texas for Hungary because he was upset about Pride Month catalogs:
In October 2021, postliberal theorist Gladden Pappin delivered a keynote address on the future of American conservatism at an obscure conference in Belgrade, Serbia. Pappin opened his lecture by recounting his personal journey from a professorship at the University of Dallas to his new residence in Eastern Europe. He described making a trip to Budapest, Hungary, the previous spring. Upon returning home to Texas that June, he found himself “surrounded by rainbow-colored propaganda at all times.”
He recoiled in anger at the Pride Month clothing catalogs arriving in his mailbox and at television programming where “every single commercial is like a lesbian couple or a gay couple or some other form of monstrosity.” The ultimate cause of this barrage, he concluded, was not the Biden administration or other usual suspects on the political left, but rather a capitalist corporate culture that “actively hate[s] the conservative lifestyle and want[s] to destroy it.”
Within two months of his return to Texas, Pappin relocated to Budapest. He accepted a new job as a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a nominally private training college set up by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to cultivate an elite youth wing of his Fidesz political party. The institution is chaired by Viktor Orban’s main political strategist Balazs Orban (no relation), and its funding comes from a more than $1 billion endowment that the Fidesz government transferred to it, mostly out of publicly owned assets.
In Pappin’s telling, Orban’s Hungary offered him — and conservatism in general — a viable alternative to the corrupted culture he saw at home.
Click here to read how Pappin’s crusade against the “globo-homo complex” led him from Harvard to Budapest and straight to the vice president.
Top stories this week
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There’s no such thing as returning a child
Modern life has dramatically lowered the stakes for most decisions. Except one, which almost everyone faces.
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
The first win of the week was pointed out to me by my colleague Lakshya Jain. A Cancer Treatment That Does More Than Scientists Thought is an Atlantic article about a cancer treatment in clinical trials to treat autoimmune diseases, which Lakshya called a “bright light of optimism.”
Amid politically salient fights about housing and energy, it can be easy to forget that a crucial part of a better future is investing in basic research. The institutions studying that treatment are international, as you’ll gather from the piece, but they include American universities that have been bullied by the Trump administration.
We have some good old-fashioned housing and energy wins for you too:
Worth watching...
The first episode of Matt and Jerusalem’s podcast released Thursday. They argued about the controversial topic of race-conscious college admissions, a.k.a affirmative action. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and watch below!
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Lakshya joined Ben Dreyfuss and Josh Barro on Central Air to talk about his data analysis of The Argument’s original polling:
The Sidebar by Kobe Yank-Jacobs
This week, Lakshya Jain wrote about Trump’s massive drop in approval among women, who have shifted against Trump by 21 points since 2024, according to The Argument’s first-quarter polling.
This trend is driven by conservative and moderate women, as well as white women — and yet somehow, when you look at 2026 vote choice — that is, which party respondents plan on voting for in the midterms — there is no increase in Democratic support among these groups.
“Even though Trump’s two-way disapproval with white, moderate women is 65%,” Lakshya wrote, “Democrats are getting just 49% of their vote.”
I don’t care if the generic ballot says you’re +6 right now, if a political party cannot capitalize on its opponent’s plummeting support, that political party has problems.
One common recommendation for Democrats is to moderate on key issues, sometimes referred to as “popularism.” A widely circulated report on this strategy suggested, simply: “Advocate for popular economic policies.”
But is policy positioning enough?
This week, writing in The New York Times, political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argued, “The problem is that policy-as-politics doesn’t work.”
Schlozman and Rosenfeld, who previously co-authored a terrific history of U.S. political parties, explained that “Parties historically have forged stronger, more sustainable connections with voters through other means,” like civic organization and mass politics.
Interacting with voters “in a sustained, repeated way that’s visible … [is] a lost art.”
If Schlozman and Rosenfeld are right, parties need to do more than make cosmetic changes to their views. Those types of thin commitments, like publicly opposing the Green New Deal in order to curry favor with rural Pennsylvanians, pale in the face of thicker commitments like actually embedding the party in the fabric of communities.1
What’s News with The Argument
The Argument recommends
I’m grateful that my job means I get to interview policymakers and technologists to dig into some of society’s biggest questions — but this week, I saved my hardest hitting journalism for my own colleagues.
What did you watch this week? What did you listen to? Did it move you? And the classic: Are you sure about that? (asked with a squint).
My co-fellow Milan Singh weighed in eagerly, like a one-man PR department trying to shape my story from the jump.2 “I have been watching Invincible, the animated adult superhero series,” he told me. Then he walked me (in extreme detail) through fight scenes in which a “Viltrumite” character deploys his “slice move.”
When pressed for further information about the significance of this, Singh added, “I really like it!”
Copy editor Eli Richman thoughtfully concurred.
Sadly, Singh’s viewing experience was undercut by an episode spoiler that autoplayed on his YouTube Shorts. He declined to comment on policy interventions that could reduce internet spoiler rates, but another staff member came to me with a novel solution to that problem:
Jerusalem Demsas read a landmark book from the 1960s, The Feminine Mystique. You can’t be disappointed by spoilers if your book is more than a half century old.
“The past really is a foreign country,” Demsas said of her reading experience, poignantly, if also mysteriously. She urged people to figure out what she meant by this on a forthcoming podcast episode with Matt Yglesias. Then, she stared out of the office window for dramatic effect.
“Jerusalem?? This interview is for a written piece, not a podcast trailer. We’re not on camera.”
“...”
Just as I was wrapping up my investigation, a few teammates buttonholed me by the coffee machine to press their agendas: Maibritt Henkel pushed a New Yorker piece about AI chatbot companions, citing “juicy details” about automated lovers. Justin Zuckerman pitched a docu-comedy about two Canadian musicians who “cook up increasingly absurd schemes to book a performance at a local venue.” (Nirvanna the Band the Show)
And me? What did I consume?
Well, last weekend, I went to New York for the release of a dear friend’s album. Between tracks, the band walked us through the meaning of the lyrics, the album art, and played studio clips of the instrumentals to show us how the sound had evolved in production.
In one sense, I am recommending my friend’s new album, “Acoustic Microwave Background II” — but really, my recommendation is to talk to the artists and makers in your life about the details of their work. It was a joy to pause over the small things that had absorbed so many of my friend’s afternoons (as reporting on these recommendations has just consumed one of mine).
“Jerusalem?”
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More to read:
Footnote from Jerusalem: Schlozman and Rosenfeld are narrowly correct, but their op-ed feels detached from the debate they're interceding in. Of course everyone would like to see a revival of American civic life. But seeing as neither Republicans nor Democrats have managed to do this — and are unlikely to do so by 2028 let alone 2026 — victory or defeat at the polls will have little to do with this sort of grand remaking of American society.
He clearly succeeded.
The more political discourse I’ve read, the more I suspect that the word “community” is always a cover for fuzziness and magical thinking
Would it be worth framing conservatives as wanting to make America like Hungary? I always thought liberals should amplify the weirdest and most off-putting unpopular ideas by the fringe right as a representation of the larger movement. It seems to be what conservatives do for the wackiest leftist ideas.