There is a gate across this road. The modern man says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, I will not let you remove it. Go away and and think. When you can tell me why it is here, I may let you destroy it.”

The gate in question is the peculiar, stubborn, and often quite disagreeable political architecture of Hungary. For sixteen years, this gate was held shut by the heavy, rusted bolt of Viktor Orbán. To the passing traveler from the bright, sunlit plazas of Brussels or the polished corridors of Washington, this gate appeared not merely old, but intentionally obstructive. It was a gate designed to keep the wind out, or perhaps more accurately, to keep the neighbors from seeing what was being cooked in the kitchen. It was a fence built of sovereignty, suspicion, and a very particular kind of national memory that refuses to believe that progress is always synonymous with movement.

Now, the gate has been swung wide. Péter Magyar has arrived, not with a sledgehammer to demolish the gate, but with a key that seems to have been forged in a different fire. The news of the election suggests that the era of the closed gate is ending, and the era of the open thoroughfare is beginning. The intellectuals are cheering; they see the removal of the obstruction as the triumph of the road. They believe that by removing the barrier, they are increasing the efficiency of the traffic. They imagine that once the Hungarian gate is gone, the wagons of the European Union, the United States, and the rest of the world can roll through with the frictionless ease of a well-oiled machine.

But there is a profound danger in the joy of the demolition expert. The tragedy of the modern reformer is that he is often so enamoured with the idea of the road that he forgets the purpose of the gate. A gate is not merely an obstacle to a road; a gate is a definition of a property. It tells you where the garden ends and the wild heath begins. It tells you that what lies within is something worth protecting from the indiscriminate trampling of the passing crowd.

The proponents of the new era argue that the old gate was a relic of a defensive, almost paranoid, isolationism. They say it was a wall built to protect a shrinking patch of soil from the encroaching tides of globalism. They see the removal of Orbán’s influence as the liberation of Hungary, a way to reintegrate a wayward province into the grand, enlightened design of the West. They believe that by opening the gates, they are bringing Hungary into the light.

Yet, we must ask: what was the gate actually guarding? It was guarding a certain idea of the Hungarian hearth. It was guarding a belief that a nation is not merely a commercial zone or a logistical node in a continental network, but a home. And a home, by its very definition, requires a door that can be locked. To the economist, a locked door is a wasted opportunity for trade; to the homeowner, a locked door is the very essence of peace.

The paradox of this political revolution is that in seeking to liberate Hungary from the “obstruction” of the past, the reformers may inadvertently strip it of the very thing that makes it a distinct entity worth visiting. If the new administration succeeds in making Hungary perfectly transparent, perfectly accessible, and perfectly aligned with every external whim, they may find that they have not liberated a nation, but merely converted a home into a highway.

The cleverness of the new leadership lies in their ability to of international relations, to speak the language of the EU and the US with a fluency that the old guard lacked. But the wisdom of the common person lies in the realization that a highway is a wonderful thing for getting from one place to another, but a terrible place to live.

We should not celebrate the removal of the gate simply because we find the gate inconvenient. We should only celebrate it if we can demonstrate that the road it blocked was actually leading somewhere better than the garden it protected. If the new era brings only the efficient transit of external interests through a hollowed-out landscape, then the reformers have committed the ultimate error of the educated: they have mistaken the removal of a boundary for the achievement of freedom, only to discover that without boundaries, there is nothing left to be free within.