American conservatives revere the illiberal playbook of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Perhaps nowhere is this inspiration more visible than in education. Yet, says Prokop Válek, this battleground against the 'woke' agenda also reveals clear limits to transnational populist learning
Education policy is a highly relevant, yet often-overlooked part of the Trump administration’s agenda. As the US president pushes back against supposedly progressive developments in schools, his administration is drawing on Orbán’s Hungary. The classroom has become a crucible for the policies of illiberal forces and the global populist radical right (PRR), and their transnational cooperation.
During Orbán’s sixteen-year tenure, his allies and associates laid the groundwork for a global illiberal network. Linking right-wing think tanks, media figures and policymakers, they built an ideological platform for national-conservative and populist causes.
Washington’s Heritage Foundation, for example, formed a partnership with the Hungarian government-funded Danube Institute. Heritage president Kevin Roberts has even called Orbán’s government ‘the model’, and many Hungarian policies have found their way into Heritage proposals. Orbán’s influence is tangible in Project 2025, the high-profile policy blueprint Heritage drew up during the Biden years for the next conservative administration. It has served as a profound inspiration for the second Trump term.
Project 2025 places significant emphasis on education. In many ways, its approach mirrors the way Budapest put schools at the centre of its culture war.
PRR parties long treated education as a lower policy priority, far less important than signature issues such as migration. Recently, however, schools have become a key arena for the PRR. Through education, it can advance its wider agenda and all three of its core ideological components: nativism, authoritarianism and populism.
Most PRR campaigning has focused on what pupils are taught, pressing for curricula that reflect national values and a conservative worldview. This focus on content is also what unites Orbán’s government and the Heritage Foundation.
Budapest and Washington both police history teaching with particular aggression. Project 2025 condemns Critical Race Theory for promoting discrimination and imposing false guilt on students and teachers. Orbán’s government, similarly, revised history textbooks and curricula, presenting certain myths about the national past – such as those surrounding the Treaty of Trianon and the loss of Hungarian territories after WW1 – as fact, and downplaying the country’s historical anti-Jewish laws.
Project 2025 warns that education on Critical Race Theory and 'gender ideology' is 'poisoning children'. Under its plans, schools would have to enforce a strictly binary definition of gender. By framing LGBTQ+ content as ‘pornographic’, the blueprint seeks to punish librarians and companies that distribute queer media. US lawmakers have banned widely distributed books on a similar pretext.
American and Hungarian radical-right actors find plenty of common ground on key cultural issues
Orbán’s government took a similar line in its 2021 ‘Child Protection Act’. Ostensibly targeting paedophiles, the law also restricted the representation of sexual minorities, and severely limited sex education in schools.
On the key cultural issues, then, the American and Hungarian radical right find plenty of common ground.
Yet education also exposes rifts within the PRR family. Its members disagree on how much control the state should have over schooling, and how far education should be privatised. This is where the Budapest blueprint breaks down.
School choice is a cornerstone of Project 2025, which puts parents’ rights at the heart of educational decision-making. The blueprint wants to take schooling out of the federal government’s hands, warning that centralised political power is destroying the family and other ‘natural’ mediating institutions. The Trump administration has since moved to dismantle the federal Department of Education entirely.
While Orbán’s education policy empowered the state to oversee child education, US conservaties view national government oversight as the source of the 'woke' agenda
Orbán’s education policy, by contrast, involved sweeping centralisation and empowerment of the state. His government created a centrally controlled public-school administration and textbook market, a standard national curriculum, and ‘loyalty-based’ selection of school directors. Orbán imposed his cultural agenda by dominating the education system. US conservatives, by contrast, see national government oversight as the very source of the ‘woke’ agenda.
This points to a wider division within the PRR’s transnational coalition. Cultural grievances travel easily across borders. The practical business of governing schools does not.
First, the two projects draw on different strands of PRR ideology. Orbán’s education agenda was overtly authoritarian, built on a highly centralised, top-down chain of command. Project 2025’s vision is more populist: it pits parents, as the ultimate authority, against an elitist centralised state.
While cultural grievances travel easily across borders, the practical business of governing schools does not
Second, the rift is rooted in distinct political cultures. The US right is deeply sceptical of an expansive federal government. Supported by the theory of negative liberty popularised by Isiah Berlin, American right-wingers tend to see freedom as the absence of coercive interference from the state across a wide range of policy areas, including education. Since the Civil Rights Movement and perhaps even further back, the US right has opposed an expansive federal role in schooling.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, American radical-right populists face far greater institutional constraints. In the US federal system, Washington plays only a limited role in education, and most power rests with states and local school districts. Orbán, by contrast, held a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority for most of his time in power, which gave him far more scope for a systematic overhaul.
The limits on cooperation between the American and Hungarian radical right are therefore not ideological, but institutional. The two share a culture war, but they cannot share a model for fighting it.
