Budapest has held its first Pride parade since the fall of Viktor Orban’s illiberal regime, and the British press is already crowing about a victory for “our values.” But let us pause before we uncork the champagne. The fall of Orban is not a simple morality tale of freedom vanquishing tyranny. It is a reminder that the pendulum of history swings between order and chaos, and we in the West are often too blind to see which side we are on.
Orban was a vulgarian, no doubt. He bullied the media, intimidated judges, and wrapped himself in the rhetoric of Christian nationalism while lining his pockets. His downfall was overdue. But to celebrate the Pride parade as a straightforward triumph of British liberal values is to ignore the deeper currents of this story. The Victorians, whom we love to invoke, understood that liberty without restraint is a recipe for decay. They championed freedom of speech and assembly, yes, but they also upheld a stringent moral code that bound society together. Today’s liberal elite has abandoned that code in favour of a hedonistic individualism that celebrates the self above all else.
Look at the scenes in Budapest. Thousands marching, waving rainbow flags, dancing in the streets. It is a carnival of self-expression. But what is being expressed? A rejection of the family, of tradition, of any authority beyond the autonomous will. This is not the freedom of Mill or Acton. It is the freedom of the Roman saturnalia, a brief release before the empire’s collapse. And we cheer it as if it were a sign of health.
The real question is not whether Orban was a tyrant—he was—but whether the alternative we offer is sustainable. Britain’s own history is instructive. We did not build our liberties on a foundation of endless transgression. We built them on a shared sense of duty, propriety, and national pride. The Pride parade in Budapest, with its flamboyant displays of sexual identity, is a direct affront to the conservative instincts that once made Hungary a bulwark against Ottoman expansion and Soviet domination. Those instincts are not always pretty, but they are necessary for survival.
I am not calling for a return to Orban’s authoritarianism. That would be absurd. But I am calling for a dose of intellectual honesty. The fall of Orban is not a victory for British values. It is a victory for a globalist ideology that sees national traditions as obstacles to be swept away. The same ideology that has hollowed out our own institutions, that has turned our universities into temples of grievance, that has made patriotism a dirty word in polite company. If Budapest’s Pride is the future, then we are all in for a rude awakening.
The old order in Hungary was corrupt and illiberal. The new order will be liberal and decadent. Which is worse? History suggests that decadence is a slower poison, but no less deadly. The Romans did not fall to barbarians at the gates until they had first fallen to barbarism within. The Pride parade in Budapest is a symbol of that internal barbarism: the worship of the self, the rejection of the sacred, the elevation of pleasure over duty.
So let the British press celebrate. Let them pat themselves on the back for exporting their values to the benighted East. But those of us who remember what Britain once was, a nation of stiff upper lips and quiet dignity, should look on with a heavy heart. The fall of Orban is not the triumph of freedom. It is the triumph of the very forces that are unravelling our own civilisation.
