The European Debate on the Fourth Amendment 1.

„One can’t separate out ideology from other political considerations. There are, I would hazard a guess, several interconnected reasons why Guy Verhofstadt (and others) have adopted the very outspoken positions that they have regarding the Fidesz government in Hungary.

Some of this is, indeed, ideological. The current liberal consensus seems to have taken Fukuyama seriously, that liberal democracy, in their definition, is the sole acceptable and meaningful form of democracy. Anything that deviates from this is absurd, irrational and, to use slightly hyperbolic language, an abomination. Indeed, to take this line of thinking a stage further, I am inclined to believe that liberalism, as currently defined, has come adrift from its historical roots. Mill or Tocqueville certainly argued in favour of a liberalism that was constituted by a plurality of voices. Instead, what calls itself liberalism today has been captured by a kind of historical inevitability, not unlike that of the Marxists, that the liberal consensus is the only legitimate form of political thinking. In a word, it has become dogma.

More widely, the problem is that this dogmatic liberalism claims that it has a monopoly of what constitutes democracy. To my mind, this is undemocratic, because it excludes sizeable swathes of opinion from the concept of democracy, negates the idea of popular sovereignty and imposes a political exclusion on those in disagreement with the newly-minted liberal canon. A moment’s thought will show that non-liberal currents – conservatism, Christian Democracy, democratic socialism, even what is written off as »populism« – all accept democratic norms, like changing governments by election, rule of law, self-limitation, feedback, accountability and transparency. The key values of dogmatic liberalism are universalism, human rights, gender mainstreaming, citizenship replacing ethnicity, a democracy agenda for the rest of the world. These cannot be converted into a necessary condition of democracy, at best they are helpful conditions.

From this perspective, the very fact that a centre-right party should not only have been elected by a two-thirds majority, but should actually have the impertinence to use it to effect a transformation is flying in the face of history and must, logically, be eliminated from the political field as a dire threat to the liberal mindset. Not least, the fact that a government with a two-thirds majority has the right to initiate constitutional changes is interpreted as a thoroughgoing threat precisely because of the transformation itself.”