Across the world authoritarians want to tell us what a ‘good life’ looks like. Here’s how liberals must respond

The State’s New Mission: Defining What Makes Life Worth Living

Wanderstayfinder.com – Liberal democracies have long operated under an implicit understanding of their proper role. These governments protect individual rights, nurture economic growth, preserve social order, and ensure fairness through impartial dispute resolution. Yet when it comes to life’s most profound questions—what constitutes a meaningful existence and what character traits citizens should cultivate—liberal states traditionally exercise restraint. Rather than elevating one particular vision of human flourishing above others, they leave such determinations to individuals, families, and local communities.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz captured this philosophy with characteristic directness:

“Mind your own damn business!”

Consider the challenge of declining birthrates across wealthy nations. Most have fallen below the replacement threshold of approximately 2.1 children per woman. This demographic shift carries significant consequences: shrinking workforces, reduced tax bases, and mounting pressure on pension systems, healthcare infrastructure, and elderly care services. Liberal democracies typically address this through mechanisms like childcare subsidies and family bonuses, framing these policies as removing barriers rather than prescribing outcomes. The approach remains inclusive—welcoming gay couples, straight couples, adoptive families, biological parents, married and divorced individuals alike.

A Different Model Emerges in Hungary

Earlier this year, I encountered an alternative approach while visiting Hungary. During interviews with prominent Fidesz party members before their April electoral defeat, hosted by a thinktank closely associated with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, I observed a fundamentally different philosophy. For Fidesz leaders, declining birthrates represented an existential threat rather than a mere statistical concern.

The party views the family unit as the crucible where Hungarians learn their national identity and develop essential virtues. Love and fidelity—values so central to their worldview that they appear in the constitution Fidesz enacted—form the foundation of this vision. One Fidesz defender expressed this perspective with remarkable candor, stating that childless women frequently experience misery and lack fulfillment. This was not casual observation but core ideology.

What I term the “good life state” elevates certain lifestyles as inherently superior and deploys government resources to advance them. Liberal states, conversely, facilitate individual choice without ranking alternatives. While Fidesz lost power, this model persists globally. Politics has returned to its most fundamental question: who determines what constitutes a worthwhile existence?

Global Patterns of Authoritarian Liberalism

From MAGA and Fidesz to Modi’s India, Xi’s China, Israel’s governing right, and Iran’s theocracy, leaders increasingly treat the good life as a public concern. Through legislation, education policy, welfare structures, incentives, penalties, and national narratives, these regimes promote specific ideals of human flourishing. Some derive from religious traditions; others emerge from secular philosophies. All prove substantive, specific, and impossible for entire populations to share simultaneously.

Liberals naturally find such developments troubling. Many of these regimes already demonstrate corruption or repression. Adding the mission of enforcing particular visions of human flourishing makes them even more intimidating. Yet liberals should recognize this pattern rather than express surprise. The conviction that decent states must avoid prescriptive visions of the good life represents historical exception rather than universal truth.

For most of human history, the good life state dominated political organization. Aristotle’s assertion that politics aims not merely at survival but at flourishing remains the most celebrated formulation. Confucian and Islamic political traditions similarly treated moral development as public responsibility. Post-liberals, therefore, position themselves as pre-liberal—promising to restore the state to responsibilities that liberals allegedly abandoned through embarrassment, weakness, or excessive politeness.

Australia Faces This Challenge

Has this global wave reached Australia? We have proven resistant rather than immune. Pauline Hanson and One Nation already navigate these currents effectively. Hanson’s advocacy for a “monocultural” Australia extends beyond immigration policy. It represents a claim about which identities and loyalties deserve public recognition, reinforced through positions on family structure, gender roles, and religious expression.

One Nation has not yet developed a program as coherent or ambitious as Fidesz’s. Nevertheless, the trajectory remains clear: government should accomplish more than protecting individual choice. It should articulate what constitutes a proper Australian life. This shift carries implications for how we understand citizenship, community, and the relationship between personal freedom and collective values. As authoritarian liberalism gains ground worldwide, liberal democracies must decide whether to retreat into passive tolerance or actively engage with these competing visions of human flourishing.