My first thought reading Marx was that, when I establish the Christian Democratic natural law commonwealth, my first order of business will be to set about creating a large, precarious class of artisans feeling the pinch of market forces and reliant on my patronage via lavish public works projects. Thus it delighted me when, arriving in Budapest, I discovered that Viktor Orbán had diligently set to work husbanding precisely such a development.
Among the more rarefied pleasures of governing is the opportunity to set down a regime architecture; a regnal style in which one’s unique tastes transcend the limits imposed by time. A regime founded on higher principle and not merely personal charisma is compelled by its nature to represent itself in materials that step outside quotidian experience. Like a great ancient oak under whose supple boughs children play, architecture allows the possibilities and their combinations latent within a coherent lifeworld to unfold. So it fell upon Orbán’s shoulders to transform his capital into an everlasting rebuke to Wokeness posted in stone, a concrete sarcophagus in which libtardry’s screams would forever be silenced, „aesthetics matter“ written into the polis’ very texture. This he has done with the renovation of the Buda Castle district, whose first stoney fruits haves slowly begun to blossom over the past few years.
The restoration of the castle, that sprawling limestone island floating above the Danube’s bluish brown plane, has been one of the Fidesz government’s signature initiatives since practically the moment it stormed back into office, though it was only in 2014 that a comprehensive plan, the National Hauszmann Program (so-called after the architect who lead the late 20th century castle regeneration project), was set in place. The costs, while delightfully opaque, have almost certainly exceed the government’s conservative estimate of 200 billion forints, at least if the still unfinished archducal palace — already 30% over budget two years ago — is anything to go by. The closed tendering process has been a boon for Orbán’s dodgy mates, while nimby busybodies from the municipal governments have been shut out entirely. This type of preposterous corruption to fund extravagant historicist structures with a bombastic nationalist subtext is very much in the spirit of the original buildings and the age in which they were built, thus elevating what might appear to the untrained eye as mere patriotic kitsch to a higher ether of authenticity.
Refreshing in the Hauszmann Program is its indifference to traditionalist pieties. No pretension is made towards Scrutonian „openness to the lifeworld“; no attempt to build edifices that harmoniously interact with each other and „enter into dialogue“ with the community, the landscape, or the neighbourhood’s architectural heritage. The point is to reconstruct, mainly on the basis of photographic evidence, the castle district as it stood in its late Habsburg pomp.
These structures, opulent palaces constructed built to serve as the headquarters of the new dualist ministries, suffered in their own time an undesirable reputation as glitzy monstrosities in kitschy historicist styles, out of keeping with the castle’s narrow streets, modest bourgeois townhouses, and mystical ruins. Emblematic thereof is the pointlessly large defence ministry, a great neorenaissance snook cocked at Vienna, where the dual monarchy’s military affairs were actually handled. „There were figures in our history who made the country poor, but Catholic,“ quipped the writer Gyula Krúdy, „Kálmán Tisza [the long-serving Hungarian Prime Minister whose ministry set the political and cultural tone for the dualist epoch] made us corrupt and sinful“. Orbán can boast having achieved all four.
Even the Hauszmann Program’s commitment to authenticity is only skin-deep. The glittering reconstructed façades only serve to mask primitive concrete frames; grey slabs that would not look out of place with a rusted satellite dish and a gypsy’s laundry hanging off of them. The intrusion of these Disneyworld behemoths amidst Buda’s ancient stones, though they may be pleasing to UnHerd’s philistine eye, have been grounds for some ire within the country’s homegrown, Béla Hamvas-reading conservative camp, which, as Anglo-American memes have proliferated at court, has increasingly found itself alienated from the old patriarch of the Hungarian centre-right. „The proportions and the materials are not right“, one young ultramontane imparts to me, gazing up at the prefab cookie-cutter slabs of the archducal palace in disgust, „the form is devoid of substance. It would be better not to have rebuilt them at all than to rebuild them like this“.
Contemplating those dreamless spires, one is reminded of Heidegger’s old hat about the Greek temple as the work of art that „gathers around itself“ the entirety of a people’s way of life. To understand the spirit embodied in the renovated Buda Castle, one might look at that other great project of Orbánist aesthetics, the conservative think tank bubble that has sprung up from the ground in the past few years. Orbán’s political origins are in the world of highbrow samizdat and the Soros network; he and his inner circle are firm believers in the power of ideas, and even firmer believers in the efficacy of the model of institutionalised intellectual production that Soros et al. transplanted to Eastern Europe in the 1990s as a means to seize the high ground of the new societies’ political and social self-understanding. While this comms juggernaut — whose power to hold voters’ minds in sway is already crumbling under threat from internet politicians like the renegade Péter Magyar (and has even begun to lose foreign tastemakers like The Critic) — may prove little more than a „great patriotic initiative“ glorifying the permanence of a way of life at the moment of its eclipse, it would be wrong to dismiss it as a mere wasteful display of hubris and not the very telos of Orbánism; the purpose of the system revealed in what it does. There is a spiritual correspondence between the vacuity of astroturfed Hungarian „conservatism“ and the concrete shells adorning the castle, their lack of depth concealed through extravagant, gilded surfaces redolent of late antique mosaics, Makart’s portraiture, and, indeed, that highly superficial style produced by every late civilisation engaged in a doomed quest for palingenesis: ornament unbound from structure, rhetoric from logic, sensation from beauty.
The Buda Castle renovation and the new Hungarian conservatism are to be understood as products of the particular cultural mould in which their originator’s mind solidified. Socialism had set the pure idea of reasoned discourse free from its own method; that arduous work of critique and systematisation, proofs and refutations, which make up the life of the mind. Like those flashes of Budapest’s fin-de-siecle splendour that the shattered ruins of the late socialist city from time to time evoked in the memory, something of this vita contemplativa survived on dusty bookshelves and in gloomy urban sitting rooms as a shining, unreachable beacon of a distant civilisation. In the post-bourgeois academic milieu in which Orbán began his political career (although did not himself come from), this heritage of the West seems to have persisted as an intuition; faded reminiscences of an older cultural memory like those which appear in Plato’s myths.
There is something of Spengler’s roman sentry in all this; an inner noblesse distilled from civilisational languor; inertia raised to a spiritual power. The dialectic between the earnest striving for a purer age and the necessary 'inauthenticity' of the form it takes is what constitutes the unique spirit of the Buda Castle regeneration projects; the essence from which it derives its duplicitous allure. From this civilisational exhaustion, Orbán has forged an ethos of conviction that, for reasons of sheer self-contradiction of the type that can only be brought into harmony within a single individual, is not likely to outlast the great populist’s regime.