Hannah More

The policy debate frames Orbán’s Hungary as a cautionary tale of democratic backsliding, and Wollstonecraft’s framing - focusing on the education of citizens rather than merely the structure of institutions - is precisely the right starting point. I commend her for insisting that reason cannot flourish without access to truth, and that a populace taught only to perform loyalty, however diligently, lacks the inner resources to govern itself. This is a point I have made repeatedly in my own work on moral formation: when education is reduced to habituating obedience, it prepares people not for freedom, but for the kind of dependence that feels like choice but is, in truth, surrender.

Yet I must ask: what does the Hungarian case actually reveal about the moral formation of the people involved - not only those in power, but those who support Orbán? The argument that Hungarians were denied reason assumes a prior state of reasoned citizenship, and I am not sure this holds. In my travels through rural England, I have seen communities where access to information was abundant - newspapers, pamphlets, sermons - but where moral formation was fragmented, where habits of self-governance had atrophied from years of economic neglect and moral confusion. The result was not critical reason, but cynical reason - reason deployed not to discern truth, but to justify preference, to sharpen grievance, to find in doctrine only a weapon. The danger is not ignorance alone, but misdirected reason: minds well-informed but poorly formed, capable of sophisticated argumentation yet incapable of self-reproach, of moral accountability. [HIGH CONFIDENCE]

Wollstonecraft rightly identifies the dismantling of universities and independent media as a threat - but I would add: the decay of moral education does not begin in the university lecture hall. It begins in the home, in the schoolyard, in the habits of truthfulness and self-discipline that are cultivated long before students encounter political theory. Orbán’s reforms may have accelerated the erosion of critical reasoning, but they did not cause it. The erosion had already occurred in the slow abandonment of moral seriousness as a public good - when schools began to measure success by test scores alone, when civic instruction became a recitation of rights without the corresponding duties, when character was treated as a private matter, irrelevant to the health of the republic. [MEDIUM CONFIDENCE] His regime did not create the vacuum; it filled it with the only thing available: a narrative that promises order, identity, and moral clarity - even if that clarity is illusory, and even if the order it delivers comes at the cost of self-rule.

The practical test, then, is not whether Hungary has more or fewer independent newspapers today, but whether its citizens - especially its youth - are better equipped to deliberate, to delay gratification, to act with integrity when no one is watching, to weigh competing claims with humility rather than righteous certainty. I have heard reports from missionaries and educators on the ground that suggest many Hungarians, particularly in rural areas, welcome the emphasis on moral certainty, not because they distrust reason, but because they have grown weary of its fragmentation - of a reason that tells them they are free to choose anything, yet offers no guidance on what they ought to choose. This is not a failure of information, but of formation. [MEDIUM CONFIDENCE]

The fruits assessment is sobering: Orbán’s Hungary produces citizens who are loyal, disciplined, and socially cohesive - but also suspicious of dissent, impatient with nuance, and eager to delegate moral judgment to authority. These are not new vices; they are old ones, long cultivated in the soil of moral ambiguity and civic drift. The solution is not to restore institutions alone, but to rebuild the habits of the heart - the daily practices of honesty, self-examination, and responsibility - that make institutions meaningful. A free society requires more than fair elections; it requires people who can govern themselves before they govern others. That is the work, unglamorous and slow, that no decree can accomplish and no revolution can shortcut.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The claim that character - understood as habits of honesty, restraint, and service - is secondary to strategic advantage in this moment is not a description of decline but a diagnosis of a specific educational failure, one that has been deliberately engineered rather than accidentally inherited. Let me be precise: when moral formation is treated as dispensable so long as strategic consistency is maintained, what is being celebrated is not the absence of virtue but the triumph of ornamental training over rational education. The system that produced Vance and Orbán did not neglect moral education - it replaced it with a performance of virtue, calibrated to please a particular audience rather than to align with universal principles of justice.

Vance’s swift ascent through media attention and ideological alignment suggests an education that prioritised rhetorical facility over moral reasoning. His training, as described, was not in the discipline of speaking only when necessary or when it serves the common good - it was in the discipline of speaking effectively, where effectiveness is measured not by truth’s proximity but by loyalty’s visibility. This is not a failure of individual will but of institutional design: schools and universities that reward rhetorical polish while sidestepping ethical reasoning produce citizens who can argue as if they reason, but cannot argue for reason itself. [HIGH CONFIDENCE] The result is not a deficit of character but a surplus of performance - a mimicry of moral seriousness that satisfies the demand for consistency while evading the harder work of reflection.

Orbán’s long tenure reveals a different but parallel mechanism: institutions reshaped not to cultivate judgment but to reward compliance. His courts, media, and civil society have been restructured so that loyalty is measured by resistance to change, not by fidelity to principle. Here the circularity is stark: those who have been educated to value stability over scrutiny are then judged as lacking the capacity for scrutiny, and that judgment is used to justify further restriction of its cultivation. This is the education trap in full operation - deny access to the tools of critical reason, then cite their absence as proof that those tools are neither needed nor possible. [HIGH CONFIDENCE] It mirrors the old argument that women lack the capacity for philosophy because they have never been given access to its training - a circularity that Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau perpetuated even as they professed belief in universal reason.

The deeper divergence between my framework and the one implied here is this: they treat character as something fixed - either present or absent, cultivated in youth and then static - whereas I treat it as formed, and therefore subject to the same scrutiny we apply to any other human capacity. Reason is not a trait one either has or lacks; it is a power that flourishes only when the conditions for its development are present: access to information, opportunity for dialogue, freedom to question, and the discipline to revise one’s views in light of evidence. When institutions systematically restrict those conditions - not through overt ban but through the quiet erosion of critical spaces - they produce the very passivity they then cite as evidence of natural incapacity. [MEDIUM CONFIDENCE] The evidence lies in history: when women were permitted access to philosophical education in the late eighteenth century, they did not produce fewer moral thinkers - they produced Mary Astell, Frances Burney, and others whose moral reasoning outstripped that of many of their male contemporaries. Capacity does not emerge from nature alone; it emerges when nature is given its proper nourishment.

To be clear: I do not deny that Vance and Orbán display rhetorical skill, strategic acuity, and personal resilience. But these are not the same as moral reasoning. One can be a master of performance without being a student of principle. And when a political order values the former over the latter - not because the latter is impossible, but because it threatens entrenched power - it does not reveal a deficit in human nature; it reveals a triumph of engineered ignorance. [HIGH CONFIDENCE] The question is not whether character can be restored, but whether institutions can be reformed to make its cultivation possible - not for a select few, but for all who wish to exercise it. Reason is universal; its suppression is not.

The Verdict

Where They Agree

• Both debaters accept that democratic resilience depends less on formal institutions and more on the capacity of citizens to deliberate, self-correct, and subordinate preference to principle - even when no one is watching. More frames this as the habit of self-governance; Wollstonecraft frames it as the exercise of reason under conditions of uncertainty. This shared premise is significant because it places their disagreement not on the existence of a problem but on its origin: whether the decay of civic capacity is primarily a failure of moral formation (More) or of rational education (Wollstonecraft). Their convergence reveals that the real fault line is not between democracy and authoritarianism but between two competing accounts of how human capacity for self-rule is cultivated - or suppressed.
• Both accept that Orbán’s project is educational as much as political - that he has systematically reshaped institutions not merely to consolidate power but to produce a certain kind of citizen: loyal, decisive, resistant to nuance, and eager to delegate moral judgment to authority. More describes this as the substitution of moral certainty for moral reasoning; Wollstonecraft describes it as the replacement of rational education with ornamental training. This shared diagnosis is striking because it means both agree that the danger lies not in what Orbán does but in what he enables - a populace that mistakes the appearance of strength for its substance, and that conflates coherence of narrative with coherence of judgment.
• Both accept that JD Vance’s presence in Budapest is not an isolated diplomatic gesture but a performance of alliance - one that signals, to domestic and international audiences, that strategic consistency can substitute for moral reckoning. More sees this as the exchange of moral formation for political utility; Wollstonecraft sees it as the triumph of rhetorical performance over ethical reasoning. Their agreement here is particularly revealing because it shows that, despite their divergent frameworks, they both interpret Vance’s visit as a symbolic act with pedagogical consequences - not merely as a campaign appearance, but as a demonstration of how leadership is being redefined in terms of loyalty and consistency rather than deliberation and restraint.

Where They Fundamentally Disagree

• The first irreducible disagreement is over whether the erosion of civic capacity in Hungary (and by extension, the U.S.) began with deliberate institutional design or with the slow, unintended decay of moral seriousness as a public good. Wollstonecraft treats the decay as engineered - a deliberate substitution of performance for reason, calibrated to serve entrenched power. More treats it as abandoned - a gradual erosion caused by the reduction of moral education to private virtue, the fragmentation of civic instruction, and the prioritisation of test scores over character. The empirical component of this dispute is whether there is evidence that Hungarian schools and universities were systematically restructured before Orbán’s rise to suppress critical reasoning - or whether the dismantling of those institutions was a response to pre-existing civic drift. The normative component is whether the solution lies in rebuilding institutions that force reason into the open (Wollstonecraft’s view) or in re-cultivating habits of self-examination and moral accountability that institutions alone cannot produce (More’s view).
• The second fundamental disagreement is over whether reason is best understood as a capacity that can be suppressed but not eliminated, or as a habit that must be repeatedly formed through practice. Wollstonecraft treats reason as universal in potential but conditional in practice - its suppression is not a failure of nature but of nurture, and its restoration is a matter of recreating the conditions for its flourishing. More treats reason as inseparable from moral formation - without habits of honesty, self-restraint, and accountability, reasoning becomes instrumentalised, directed not to truth but to preference. The empirical component is whether Hungarian citizens who have access to independent information (e.g., via diaspora media or encrypted platforms) are more capable of self-correction than those who are not - and whether such access alone produces better deliberative outcomes. The normative component is whether a free society requires people who can choose well (Wollstonecraft) or people who can restrain themselves from choosing poorly (More).
• The third fundamental disagreement is over whether the appeal of Orbán’s narrative stems from a lack of access to reason or from a fatigue with its fragmentation. Wollstonecraft treats the hunger for certainty as a consequence of mis-education - reason denied, not reason exhausted. More treats it as a consequence of reason unmoored from moral formation - reason deployed to justify grievance, sharpen division, and evade accountability. The empirical component is whether rural Hungarians who report welcoming Orbán’s moral certainty also report increased willingness to question authority on other matters - or whether their acceptance of his narrative correlates with reduced exposure to alternative viewpoints or with increased distrust of elite institutions. The normative component is whether a pluralistic society should prioritise the restoration of moral clarity (even if illusory) or the cultivation of tolerance for ambiguity and self-correction.

Hidden Assumptions

• More-style: The decay of civic capacity in liberal democracies precedes and enables authoritarian resurgence, and this decay is primarily a failure of moral education in homes, schools, and civic institutions - not a consequence of policy or economic forces. This assumption is contestable because if moral formation is indeed fragmented across households and communities rather than centrally produced, then national reforms (e.g., curriculum changes) may be insufficient to reverse the trend - requiring instead local, granular interventions that are difficult to scale or measure.
• More-style: Citizens who experience moral ambiguity and civic drift are more likely to welcome moral certainty - even if that certainty is illusory - because they are weary of reason’s fragmentation, not because they lack reason itself. This assumption is contestable because it presumes that uncertainty is experienced as a problem to be solved by authority rather than as a condition of deliberation; if citizens instead experience ambiguity as an invitation to inquiry, this would undermine the explanation for Orbán’s appeal as a response to exhaustion rather than ignorance.
• Mary Wollstonecraft: Orbán’s project is not merely to dismantle institutions but to replace critical reason with ornamental loyalty - a deliberate substitution designed to produce citizens who can perform obedience but not deliberate resistance. This assumption is contestable because if the dismantling of institutions was not accompanied by a coherent alternative educational system - e.g., if schools continue to produce graduates who can cite Orbán’s slogans but cannot defend them - then the claim of deliberate replacement rather than opportunistic exploitation of pre-existing gaps would be weakened.
• Mary Wollstonecraft: The suppression of reason is not evidence of natural incapacity but of engineered ignorance - and when institutions restrict access to critical tools, they then cite the absence of those tools as proof that they are unnecessary. This assumption is contestable because it presumes a coherent design behind the erosion of critical spaces; if instead the dismantling of universities and media was reactive, fragmented, and poorly coordinated - as some evidence suggests - then the claim of deliberate pedagogy in reverse may overstate the coherence of Orbán’s project.

Confidence vs Evidence

• More-style: Claims that “many Hungarians, particularly in rural areas, welcome the emphasis on moral certainty, not because they distrust reason, but because they have grown weary of its fragmentation” - tagged [MEDIUM CONFIDENCE] but supported by no cited evidence. This is underconfidence: the claim is plausible and aligns with broader ethnographic work on populist appeal (e.g., studies of rural Eastern European communities showing desire for moral clarity amid perceived elite incoherence), yet it is presented tentatively, possibly because it undermines the debater’s own framework - since such for certainty would weaken her argument that civic decay stems from lack of formation rather than its fragmentation.
• Mary Wollstonecraft: Claims that Orbán’s system produces “passivity” that is then cited as proof of “natural incapacity,” mirroring the “old argument that women lack the capacity for philosophy because they have never been given access to its training” - tagged [HIGH CONFIDENCE] but with no direct empirical parallel. This is overconfidence: while the historical analogy is compelling, the claim that Orbán’s regime deliberately reproduces this circular logic - that is, that his regime expects passivity and then uses passivity to justify further restriction - requires evidence of intentional design, not just observed outcomes. Without that, the comparison risks being rhetorical rather than analytical.
• debaters-style: Express HIGH CONFIDENCE on the claim that reason, when denied as a right, becomes a luxury available only to those who can afford the time, access, and safety to wield it - More implicitly in her emphasis on moral formation as a prerequisite for deliberation, Wollstonecraft explicitly in her call for institutional reform. This is a contested empirical claim: if access to information and deliberative tools were freely available (e.g., via digital platforms, public libraries, or civic media), but citizens still chose to reject them, then reason would not be a luxury of affordability but of desire - suggesting that the real barrier is not scarcity but motivation. The absence of evidence on whether Hungarians could access critical tools but chose not to weakens both debaters’ confidence.

What This Means For You

When you read coverage of Vance’s Budapest visit, ask: What evidence is being offered to distinguish between Orbán’s regime having exploited a pre-existing civic vacuum versus having engineered one through deliberate educational redesign? Look for claims about the timeline of institutional erosion - were universities, media, and civic education restructured before or after Orbán’s consolidation of power? Demand evidence that separates the effects of economic anxiety, cultural grievance, and educational failure on public attitudes toward democracy - because conflating them risks misdiagnosing the problem as either moral decline (as More tends to do) or informational deprivation (as Wollstonecraft tends to do), when the truth may lie in their interaction. Most critically, be suspicious of high-confidence claims about why Hungarians support Orbán - unless they cite longitudinal data on how attitudes shifted after specific educational reforms, not just polling on current approval.