The Populist God: Reflections From a Former Right-Wing Populist
By Gábor Vona | October 26, 2019
At 20, I began my political career and was positioned to the right of Viktor Orbán, then prime minister of my country, Hungary. By 40, I finished my political career and Viktor Orbán was positioned to the right of me and was the prime minister again.
During these twenty years a lot happened to me, to Hungary, and to the world. My 20-year-old self would have enthusiastically celebrated Trump, Orbán, Boris Johnson, and the triumph of the populist right. However, my fully adult self believes that these leaders are moving the entire world toward calamity.
The world’s current crisis is not just economic, cultural, political, structural, diplomatic, geopolitical, and ecological – it is something much deeper. If we want to understand it, we have to dig to the roots of human existence. As a former right-wing populist, that’s what I did, too. I dug deeply into myself, relying on the works of philosophers, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and all researchers of human nature. That is how I found Ernest Becker.
My political career may be divided into three periods. I started as a centre-right conservative, then I became well-known on the radical right and, and eventually I arrived at a position apart from any one particular ideology, leaving all sides and isms behind.
Why were there so many bends in the road? How could the same person have such different views on the world in a relatively short time? Was I perhaps, in lack of solid fundamental values, just drifting along with the events? Some probably think so. Or was I perhaps just riding the wave of certain political trends to become popular, and then dropped them when they were no longer useful? Some probably think so.
But what I felt inside was neither drifter nor opportunist. I felt that I represented what I believed to be the only truth. And that’s what I was doing, in fact. Although I represented different things in each of my three political periods, I always lived the same experience inside. I fought for a world that offered me safety, and I championed a cause that gave reason to my existence. In turn, this heroic stance helped me prove to myself that my life had value and importance. I did what everybody does, and what is the repressed essence of each human life: I tried to control the death anxiety that rages in me, and in all of us.
In this article, I don’t want to talk about what I did right or wrong in each period, because that’s not what matters here. Looking back, that man of the past sometimes does not seem to be me, even though I know it was me, and what I went through has shaped who I am today. So when I analyze my own story, it’s as if I was analyzing three political “tribes.” And if you’ve analyzed three, you’ve basically analyzed them all. What is the essence of tribal logic? “If someone isn’t with us, they are against us.” Whatever goes on in our tribe is good, correct, and right, even if it obviously isn’t. Whatever goes on in another tribe is treacherous, bad, and dangerous, even if it obviously isn’t. The human being is an incredibly intelligent creature that can reduce itself to astounding stupidity. Of course, we always think it’s the other tribes’ members who are stupid, but the tribal existence itself reduces our intellect.
But why? Why do we all fall into the tribal trap? Because we are problematic creatures. According to the Catholic doctrine, we all come to this world with Adam and Eve’s original sin. Perhaps what we come to this world with is not original sin but original death anxiety, which we did indeed inherit from the first human couple in the history of evolution who understood that there was death, and that they, too, would die. This was the real “fall,” the dramatic moment when the human being had to leave the carefree paradise of nature, and construct a civilization, a pseudo-Eden, where they could seek out potential solutions to the newly-emerged death anxiety.
And what does it have to do with politics? Civilization broke into a thousand pieces right from the beginning. As Becker states, cultures, social systems, and worldviews developed to make the world comprehensible for those living in it, and to make life feel meaningful. Feeling part of a system of value in turn makes people feel as if they will live on at least symbolically, and this reduces death anxiety.
But conflict was inevitable. The very existence and otherness of one tribe threatened the beliefs of another, or as Becker said, they had competing immortality projects. In order to function effectively as an immortality project, one has to feel completely immersed within it – that their version of reality, their worldview, is the ultimate truth. That’s why religions, states, and, in our modern age, ideologies, started to wage wars on one another. All of these wars were driven by tribal logic. So, contrary to the claims that tribes are nothing but an ethological heritage – since our primate relatives also live in groups – the tribe is actually a specifically human and specifically civilizational legacy, too.
If you interpret politics as nothing but a struggle of economic or social lobby groups, you only scratch the surface. In fact, politics is also a competition of immortality projects in our modern and secular age. There are some world leaders, albeit too few, who are documented to have read Becker. If more of them had read his works, they would know that the human being is a creature with death anxiety.
As long as we are hungry, we believe all problems will disappear as soon as we have had enough to eat. As soon as we have had our fill however, we begin to feel it’s not enough; we need something more. We need to believe that our life has value. Otherwise, we become overwhelmed by an ancient, visceral anxiety. What happens if we can’t find a solution for this anxiety? Politicians come and solve it for us. They identify a source for our anxiety: the fear of immigrants, terrorists, George Soros, etc., and immediately tell us how we can get rid of this irritating feeling. And the solution is far simpler than we ever thought: all we need to do is vote for them!
Politicians and voters are anxious people seeking their own immortality strategy just like the rest of us. Of course, it doesn’t absolve you of any misdeeds, neither can it be used for relativizing obviously nefarious ideas, but it may facilitate understanding of ourselves and others. Becker’s thoughts and the development of Terror Management Theory can help us comprehend the real underlying motives of political conflicts. And this can be the first step towards a solution.
The populist agenda of Trump, Orbán, and the others provides their followers with the same thing that religions offer for their believers through the help of God: it gives them the taste of immortality. Since everyone wants a taste of this fruit forbidden ever since Adam and Eve, we must not underestimate its power. However, an “anti-populist God” can never be the remedy against the current and growing dominance of a “populist God.” The proper response to a tribal challenge is not offering another tribe as an alternative, at least not if we want a real change.
The best and also hardest task is to help people recognize their own motivations through self-awareness and introspection. By doing so, we can become capable of empathy, real freedom, honest tolerance, mutual respect, and reasonable dialogue. It’s insanely hard, but Becker gave us the key to it. And maybe my example, i.e., how a “priest of the populist God” became a free traveller, unbound to any tribe, can help others on their way.
Gábor Vona (born 1978) is a Hungarian historian, teacher, and politician who led the political party Jobbik from 2006 until 2018. He was the party’s candidate for the position of Hungarian prime minister in the 2010, 2014, and 2018 national elections. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 2010 to 2018, and led the Jobbik parliamentary group until 2016. Vona initiated to re-define Jobbik from a nationalist radical movement to a conservative people’s party after 2014, when the party became the strongest opposition party against Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz. Vona tendered his resignation after disappointing election results in the 2018 parliamentary election, and also returned his obtained parliamentary mandate. After finishing his political carrier in August 2018, he started a vlog focusing on non-political issues, which is followed mostly by young people. In 2019 Vona established the Second Reform Era Foundation to mobilize civil activity in Hungary.