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Hungary is also an interesting sign of how this new "postliberal right" have abandoned the plot on traditional conservatism. One of the main selling points for Fidesz left you'll see from voters is the price controls and price caps that Orban has been putting in. This new breed of "conservatism" is deeply socialist in how they think. So of course Trump, the guy who has been raging against price gouging, threatening companies to not raise prices in response to tariffs and nationalized quite a few corporations thinks Orban is real swell. In the same way it's not a surprise just how well they get along with the Sanders and Mamdani faction of the Dems. They all think the same, evil corporations conspiring against the people. Sanders types might think it's to "oppress the poor" and Trump/Orban types might think it's to "make him look bad" or whatever, but the deeper logic is the same.
I don't know if their economic policy became retarded because they were chasing the poor idiot voters or if poor idiot voters started propping them up because they're stupid, but either way it's quite meaningful that future electoral results aren't looking good for the postliberal right. It's not enough to just screech about prices and try to brute force it, you have to deliver results. And that means embracing the reality that markets work..
Traditional conservatism ideologically has little interesting to say about the economy. It is true that most conservative parties discovered that supply side economics works in the seventies and eighties, but this was a marriage of convenience- driven largely by the left being socialist(which does not work) at the time.
My understanding based on my very vague knowledge of the relevant history is that in the US, conservatism became entwined with free-market capitalism ideology only around the 1940s, in large part as a reaction to the New Deal and communism. So it is not too surprising that eventually conservatism is becoming partly un-entwined from it.
But I am sure that the real history is much more complex than that.
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See, the thing is that actual traditional conservatism doesn’t necessarily have any strong ideological reason to join itself with pro-business, anti-regulation free market economics. The latter is approximately what Americans call libertarianism, and what Europeans call (classical) liberalism. It’s really a historical contingency that in America, this political strain happened to join forces with the religious right/moral majority/tradcon types from approximately the Reagan era to the Trump era; even then, it was far from a solid Republican voting base (cf. Clinton peeling some of them away with the Third Way, “the end of welfare as we know it”, NAFTA, etc.)
There’s no reason to think this should be a general law of conservative politics; indeed, globally speaking, it tends to be the exception rather than the rule, especially in systems that favor the formation of smaller, focused parties rather than two big amorphous tents. Hell, even within the FPTP Anglosphere, it’s not uncommon to find conservatives, leftists, and classical liberals form 3 entirely separate parties (cf., respectively, Tories, Labour, and LibDems in the UK; Tories, NDP, and Liberals in Canada)
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