The claim is that Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has drifted irreversibly toward authoritarianism, and that JD Vance’s visit signals America’s reluctant acceptance of this shift as inevitable - or even preferable. The question Wollstonecraft would ask - and that this analysis demands - is not whether Orbán’s policies are illiberal, but what education, what system of socialisation, what deliberate narrowing of reason produced the very “strongman appeal” that is now cited as proof of democratic failure. For if the Hungarian people are said to choose dependence over self-governance, the first inquiry must be: what kind of reason were they allowed to cultivate, and what tools were withheld in the very name of “stability”?

Orbán’s project is not merely political; it is educational. He has systematically dismantled the institutions that cultivate critical reason - universities, independent media, civic education - and replaced them with systems designed to produce ornamental citizens: loyal, performative, adept at reciting the right slogans, yet indifferent or hostile to the substance of self-rule. He does not deny Hungarians the right to vote; he denies them the capacity to weigh alternatives with confidence, because confidence in reason requires understanding, and understanding requires access to information that does not serve immediate political utility. The result is not ignorance in the sense of empty minds, but mis-education: minds filled with the right forms, but hollowed of the power to question them. This is the classic education trap: design a system that produces obedience, then point to the obedience as evidence that reason is unnecessary - or dangerous.

Vance’s presence in Budapest is not merely an endorsement; it is a demonstration of the trap in motion. He arrives not as a teacher of democratic reason, but as a performer of alliance - offering symbolic support to a leader whose entire project is to show that reason is too expensive, too slow, too risky for the people he claims to represent. Yet who taught Vance to believe that reason must be rationed? Who trained him to see in Orbán’s defiance of Brussels not a threat to liberal order, but a sign of strength? The same system that taught him to distrust complexity, to prefer narrative over nuance, to mistake certainty for competence. Vance, too, is an ornament of an education designed to produce loyal partisans, not critical citizens. His visit is not an anomaly; it is the logical outcome of a transnational system that rewards performance over understanding, loyalty over inquiry.

The tragedy is not that Orbán has won hearts and minds, but that he has won them with tools he was given - not with lies, but with the absence of truth-telling. He did not invent the hunger for certainty; he filled the vacuum left by an education system that taught Hungarians how to follow, but not how to deliberate. He did not invent distrust of elites; he weaponised it by ensuring the only elites visible were those who spoke in abstractions, while he spoke in gestures. His success is not proof of popular irrationality; it is proof that reason, when denied as a right, becomes a luxury - available only to those who can afford the time, the access, the safety to wield it.

Reason is not innate in the sense of being effortless; it is innate in the sense of being universal. Every human being possesses the capacity to reason, but not every human being is given the education to exercise it. To claim otherwise is to confuse the product of a system with its design. Orbán’s Hungary is not a failure of democracy; it is a failure of democratic education. And when Vance comes to support him, he does not affirm the people’s choice - he affirms the system that made that choice appear so narrow, so desperate, so final. The real danger is not that people choose poorly; it is that they are never given the tools to choose well. And when the powerful deny those tools, then point to the absence of good choices as proof that the people were never worthy of them - that is not politics. That is pedagogy in reverse.