In the past few weeks, Hungary has been in the news. The election pitted Viktor Orbán, the controversial prime minister who has ruled for sixteen years, against a former member of his own party, Péter Magyar. To European and American observers, the election was about the fate of liberty against a would-be autocrat. Hungary, it seems, has always been a uniquely public battlefield in the war between autocracy and liberty. And Americans have, for 170 years, watched the fate of the Central European nation with fascination.

　　In 1852, Lajos Kossuth, the most famous Hungarian in the world, made his way to the shores of North America. Three years earlier, Kossuth earned a reputation as a freedom fighter during the series of revolutions that shook Europe in 1848 and 1849. Most were driven by liberalism and nationalism. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the latter was usually seen as an expression of the former. Some movements included democratic elements, but all of them sought to reduce the power of or overthrow autocratic monarchies that ruled Mitteleuropa.

　　The massive revolution that rocked Vienna and led to the dismissal of Prince Klemens von Metternich convinced the Habsburg imperial family to flee to a fortress in what is now Czechia. The German statesman, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, had in 1815 helped organize the Congress system that kept Europe from general wars at the expense of representative government on the continent. Europe would—Metternich hoped—stay peaceful and autocratic. The voices of liberal nationalists were systematically squashed, until they finally exploded in 1848–49.

　　The revolution in Vienna spread to other parts of the Habsburg-ruled Austrian Empire, including Hungary. Lajos Kossuth and others advocated for a constitution and were even willing to accept a Habsburg monarch, provided that their sovereign rule in accordance with a written fundamental law. Unwilling to allow any measure of Hungarian sovereignty or devolution and aware that the Austrian Empire was in danger of politically collapsing, the new teenage emperor, Francis Joseph, enlisted the help of Tsar Nicholas I, who sent a fighting force of over 250,000 to pacify Hungary and protect the Habsburg throne. Kossuth fled and escaped execution; many other Hungarians did not. In Britain and in America, he was celebrated for the rest of his life as a freedom fighter. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune, said that “among the orators, patriots, statesmen, exiles,” Kossuth had no superior, “living or dead.”

　　Americans celebrated Hungarian freedom-fighting, but stopped short of thinking that Americans needed to do Hungary’s freedom-fighting; that was a job left to Hungarians themselves. Walt Whitman wrote of the elderly Kossuth, living in exile in Turin. “There is Kossuth, too—living still—nearly 90! I knew Kossuth—talked with him on several occasions. He still lives, as bright intellectually—the same fine noble soul as ever. When I saw him he was a small man, eloquent to a great height—vivacious.”

　　Whitman, adoring as he was of Kossuth, believed the Hungarian revolutionary “made a great mistake” after his visit to the United States. “He had been almost importuned to come here by officials, by Congress, was brought in an American man-of-war. At that time any one of the nations—Germany, Austria, France, Russia—would have killed him—hung him—if they could have got him in their hands.” Those facts alone garnered American sympathy, because Americans hated above all autocrats denying self-determination. Kossuths great mistake, Whitman nonetheless argued, was that “after [he] got here was to make an effort to have America range herself in his cause. We all recognized it at once as deplorable. We could not have done it then, could not do it now, ought never to do it. Yet he went up and down through our states, pleading for it.” Whitman, ever devoted to America’s splendid isolation, was “even opposed to Congress petitioning the Czar to investigate Siberia—even that is out of our province.”

　　Washington and Hawthorne give Americans permission to praise good government in Europe, but also to go about our days without thinking too much more about it.

　　American literary men, perhaps more than American politicians, managed to preserve a statesmanlike sympathy for representative government, a republican distaste for autocracy, and a prudential reserve for how freely to emote about seemingly sympathetic liberal democratic revolutionaries. In his 1851 novel The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne poured cold water on the enthusiasm young members of the Democratic party had for the “Young America” movement, committed to a worldwide revolution of enlightenment democracy. Like any young American republican devoted to the seemingly transcendent cause of liberty, Hawthorne’s semi-autobiographical character Miles Coverdale sees the Hungarian cause as worthy: “If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brace rush upon the levelled bayonets.” But further than that, Coverdale was “loth to pledge himself.”

　　Catherine Jones, a literature professor at the University of Aberdeen, notes that Hawthorne’s approach exhibited a sort of duality that rested in the American soul regarding the international march for democracy. It was certainly right to sympathize with the Hungarians’ plight, but it was, said Hawthorne, not right to be mindlessly enthusiastic about such a cause. There was, he worried, “something foolish” in the “hyperbolic praise” heaped upon Kossuth.

　　Hawthorne’s brooding and cautious approach to the march of international democracy was increasingly out of step with his own party. Stephen Douglas and Franklin Pierce both appealed to the notion that America was a young, virile, and strong country destined to use its imposing brawn to create worldwide democracy. That the Young America movement was revolutionary was a given; the extent of how revolutionary it was horrified conservatives like Hawthorne. John O’Sullivan, a Democratic Party operative and journalist, said, “All history is to be re-written; political science and the whole scope of all moral truth have to be considered and illustrated in the light of the democratic principle. All old subjects of thought and all new questions arising, connected more or less directly with human existence, have to be taken up again and re-examined.”

　　O’Sullivan’s vision of worldwide democracy found its fulfillment decades later in the statecraft of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, like his Young America predecessors, wanted to create a democratic Europe, and the wartime president assumed that he could manage American sympathies in such a way as to turn his countrymen’s affections towards the true lovers of freedom in the aftermath of World War I. The “true spirit of modern democracy,” Wilson believed, rested in Russia, and he thought that he alone could manage what was quickly becoming a series of ever more violent and dangerous revolutions.

　　Hawthorne and Whitman, more than antebellum Democratic statesmen or Woodrow Wilson, obeyed the commandments of Washington in his famed Farewell Address. Written with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton, Washington warned against “permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations” and also against “passionate attachments” for others. Hatred of a given country enslaved American interests to an impassioned and unthinking reactionary policy. Impassioned sympathy for a country would produce “a variety of evils.” What might appear to the Wilsonian or to the Young America revolutionary as a sort of Hawthorne-esque antipathy was in fact nothing more than the good counsel of the Father of the Country, consistently applied to world events and foreign politics.

　　Given the prominence of the themes of liberty and autocracy at play in Western politics in 2026, its not surprising that Americans renewed their long-time interest in Hungarian politics. In the recent election, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party was roundly defeated by Péter Magyar and the Tizsa Party. Tizsa is an acronym for what translates into English as Respect and Freedom, and Tizsa earned the votes of the majority of Hungarians because it respected at least one long-time tradition in Hungarian politics: don’t seem too cozy with the autocratic rule of Russia. In 1849 and then again during the Cold War, Russian troops invaded Hungary to maintain autocratic rule. In 1956, Hungarian freedom fighters gave their lives to pull apart the iron curtain and taste freedom; Russian soldiers crushed the Hungarian Uprising in November 1956, killing thousands; a quarter of a million Hungarians fled their native land, and many of those exiled died heartbroken in foreign countries, weeping for their native land.

　　Americans understandably, and rightly, sympathize with the flourishing of healthy ordered liberty in Central Europe. And why shouldn’t we? Americans hate autocrats. But likewise, there’s no specific reason for Americans to obsessively believe that Péter Magyar is a savior of Europe or a friend of America simply because he’s understandably committed to keeping Russian influence and corruption out of Hungary. Washington and Hawthorne give Americans permission to praise good government in Europe, but also to go about our days without thinking too much more about it. There is something, Hawthorne might tell us, intrinsically foolish about Americans hyperbolically praising Hungarian democrats or Russian autocrats.