How a conservative conference morphed into a crisis of liberalism

The half-hearted police raid at a reactionary gabfest was the culmination of a discomfiting series of events around the “National Conservatism” conference on April 16th-17th. At the ninth such jamboree, organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, an American outfit, the star attraction of this iteration was Viktor Orban, Hungary’s proudly illiberal prime minister. Unsurprisingly, some speakers held views outside the centrist consensus, albeit ones endorsed by plenty of voters. This lèse-libéralisme sent local Belgian authorities on a misguided mission to prove the “cancel culture” decried by conservatives is not just a conspiracy. A policy that aims to exclude hard-right parties from coalition governments, known as the cordon sanitaire, metastasised into an ugly variant whereby merely expressing such ideas is beyond the pale.