The Return of Common Sense
How politics sorts ordinary needs into opposing identities
The election that removed Viktor Orbán from power in Hungary this April was easy to describe in historic terms. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide, ending sixteen years of increasingly authoritarian Fidesz rule. From abroad, the contest seemed to encompass every grand political struggle of our age: democracy and authoritarianism, Europe and Russia, Trump and Brussels, sovereignty and Ukraine.
Hungarian voters had plenty of other things on their minds.
In a poll conducted shortly before the election, Tisza voters listed corruption and governance, public services and the cost of living among Hungary’s biggest problems. Among Fidesz voters, energy security came first, followed closely by the cost of living and inflation. Péter Magyar had invested much of the campaign talking about living standards, hospitals, social services and corruption.
There was something familiar about this.
The pattern predated Tisza. In a poll cited by political scientist András Bíró-Nagy around the 2018 election, Fidesz voters, Jobbik supporters, Socialists, and undecided voters all ranked the deterioration of healthcare first among their fears about Hungary’s future. Rising poverty came second across political camps. Migration ranked third among Fidesz voters and did not make the top five elsewhere.
These people were supposed to inhabit different political worlds; nevertheless, they were all worried about the same healthcare system.
What caught my attention was the gap between the intensity of Hungary’s political divisions and the ordinariness of many of the concerns beneath them.
Most of us do not experience our lives as ideological programmes. We experience rent, mortgage payments, salaries, food prices, school places, waiting lists, childcare bills and the amount left in our bank account at the end of the month. We want to trust that illness will not destroy us financially, that old age can be lived with some dignity, that work will provide a reasonable degree of security and that our children have a plausible chance of doing better.
Political disagreement should be viewed as a healthy byproduct of a functioning democracy. People often converge on the problem and sometimes on the destination, and the disagreements come when politics decides how to get there.
If that distinction holds beyond Hungary, we should find the same pattern elsewhere: broad agreement about what is going wrong, followed by much deeper disagreement over what government should do about it. The United States provides strong evidence of that very divide.
In a 2023 survey, 84 per cent of Americans identified improving the economy as an important policy priority, 77 per cent healthcare affordability, 76 per cent K-12 education, 68 per cent housing affordability and 61 per cent childcare affordability. Support crossed partisan identities at this level, but when the discussion shifted to taxation, redistribution and specific programmes, the gaps widened substantially.
The discrepancy is clearest when the questions get specific. Wanting affordable healthcare is one proposition. Agreeing on how to finance it is another. Political debate routinely collapses those stages into one.
Two voters can agree that housing has become unaffordable and argue fiercely about planning laws, rent controls, public housing, taxation and construction subsidies. Two people can want their local hospital to function and disagree about insurance, taxation and the role of private providers. They may want broadly recognisable lives while holding very different theories about the state.
There is another complication. Our beliefs often cut across the internally consistent ideologies that party politics assigns to us.
A person can favour stronger borders and higher minimum wages. They can dislike taxes and defend Medicare. They can support family subsidies, industrial protection and conservative social values. They can want government intervention in housing and resent government intervention somewhere else.
Fidesz itself governed through precisely this mixture. It fused nationalism and social conservatism with utility-price reductions, family benefits, housing subsidies and intervention in food and fuel prices. Research on Orbán-era social policy describes a mixture of market-oriented, statist and conservative elements. Political scientist Zsolt Enyedi has used the term “paternalist populism” to capture part of this combination.
Its electorate never fit comfortably into a simple class model either. In 2018, 58 per cent of Hungarian villagers voted for Fidesz, rising to 65 per cent in underdeveloped districts. More recent research has found the governing right drawing heavily from both lower and upper social strata.
Government intervention tells us surprisingly little by itself about the political project it serves. A housing subsidy may redistribute resources, reward marriage, encourage childbirth, support middle-class asset ownership or do several of these things simultaneously. Though a welfare programme can expand state protection while drawing strict boundaries around eligibility.
Once state intervention is detached from a simple left-right label, another distinction comes into view. People can judge the same intervention differently depending on who they believe it is for.
A randomised 2024 American survey makes this quite observable. Republican voters were asked about restoring a refundable child tax credit. When the proposal was framed around helping “low-income families”, support stood at 43 per cent. When the beneficiaries were described as “hard-working families”, Republican support rose to 54.6 per cent.
An 11.6-point gap opened because a description changed.
That finding gets closer to something important about contemporary politics. People encounter policy through moral stories. Who worked? Who contributed? Who deserves help? Who is taking advantage? Who belongs to the community being asked to pay?
Changing the description of the family receiving the credit altered how Republican voters judged the policy. A phrase about work harboured a moral judgment about deservingness, and support moved with it.
History shows how unstable these ideological labels can be. Policies now treated as belonging naturally to one political tradition were often created, defended or expanded by several.
Europe’s welfare states had several political parents.
Bismarck’s conservative government introduced health, accident and old-age insurance in Germany during the 1880s, partly to contain socialist agitation and stabilise society. British Liberal governments introduced old-age pensions in 1908 and national insurance three years later. Socialists and labour movements pushed welfare provision much further. Whereas Christian democrats developed their own case for social protection around family, solidarity, human dignity and the common good.
Postwar Christian democrats could defend private property and markets while accepting considerable public responsibility for welfare. In Britain, Labour built the NHS and much of the postwar welfare state, while subsequent Conservative governments largely accepted its basic framework. By the late 1950s, political arguments increasingly concerned design, financing and scope rather than the continued existence of the entire structure.
The ideological differences remained substantial. Christian democratic welfare systems often preserved occupational hierarchies and traditional family structures, whereas social democrats pursued stronger egalitarian ambitions. Arguments over taxation, ownership, eligibility and redistribution never vanished.
Yet public healthcare, pensions, social insurance and family support have occupied a much wider ideological territory than contemporary political vocabulary sometimes suggests.
That history makes ideological ownership look far less permanent. Modern party competition adds another layer: voters can shift towards the political package associated with their side.
We tend to imagine that we accumulate political opinions and then choose the party that represents them. Research suggests the relationship can run in both directions.
A study of American education politics between 2007 and 2022 found that widening partisan gaps were driven heavily by sorting, with voters overwhelmingly adjusting issue positions towards those associated with their party rather than changing parties to match their existing preferences. Survey experiments on party cues similarly find that attaching partisan ownership to a position can alter support, although the size of the effect varies considerably across issues.
Parties organise our mixed opinions into recognisable political packages. A view on immigration can pull in assumptions about welfare, national identity and deservingness. A school dispute can absorb arguments about religion, race and national history. Positions that began separately can gradually feel like parts of the same political identity.
Political scientists studying polarisation have described the result as a partisan “mega-identity”, as race, religion, geography and other social affiliations increasingly align with party. As more of a person’s social identity is absorbed into partisanship, hostility towards the opposing camp can carry greater weight in political loyalty and behaviour.
That alignment changes the rewards of political competition. A threatening opponent can help hold a coalition together. Political conflict can mobilise voters and reinforce allegiance. Partisan media can deepen hostility, while research on affective polarisation has linked stronger partisan animosity with greater political participation.
These divisions have histories of their own. Politicians inherit them, interpret them and choose which ones receive the greatest political attention.
Politicians do not need to invent our differences, as they can decide which differences politics will revolve around.
Hungary illustrates the mechanism with remarkable clarity.
Bíró-Nagy called migration a political “jackpot” for Fidesz. From 2015 onward, the government successfully made migration a persistent organising concern for its electorate. Regardless, a separate study using five rounds of European Social Survey data from 2010 to 2018 found that economic satisfaction predicted support for Fidesz better than anti-migrant or anti-EU attitudes.
Economic satisfaction could influence whether someone supported the government, while migration helped shape the political identity associated with that support.
A voter can care deeply about the cost of groceries and immigration at the same time. A politician can offer subsidies while campaigning on national identity. Economic and cultural politics can coexist inside the same voter.
Shared anxieties have limits. In one healthcare study using the 2022 General Social Survey, Americans overwhelmingly recognised inequality in access: 79.5 per cent agreed that richer people had easier access to healthcare, while 56.5 per cent described the situation as unfair.
The drop from 79.5 to 56.5 per cent demonstrates how rapidly agreement can thin when description turns into moral judgment.
That distance grows even further when moral judgment leads to questions about what society owes people. In the same 2024 survey on child-health policies, support for candidates favouring federalised Medicaid stood at 88.5 per cent among Democrats and 43.5 per cent among Republicans.
Cheaper housing or better railways cannot dissolve disagreements over immigration, abortion, religion, national identity or redistribution. Some of those disagreements are profound. Any politics built on pretending they are artificial will collapse as soon as it encounters them.
Political life contains another layer too: a more ordinary set of expectations about what a functioning society should make possible.
This is partly why the phrase “common sense” interests me, despite all its political baggage.
Donald Trump used it explicitly in his second inaugural address in January 2025. He promised a “revolution of common sense” and connected the phrase to borders, sovereignty, government and national restoration.
I never expected Trump’s idea of common sense to resemble mine. Much of what he described struck me as profoundly ludicrous, and it still does to this day.
Every political tradition tries to present its principles as the natural order of things. “Common sense” is one way of making that claim.
My own use of the phrase is political too. The argument over what counts as ordinary has, in itself, cultivated ideological weight.
I struggle to find common sense in a society where someone can work full time and still be unable to afford a home near their job, or where a couple postpones having children because housing and childcare consume their income. These are ordinary conditions of life, not ideological questions.
History gives us plenty of labels for the institutions built around these problems: social democracy, Christian democracy, democratic socialism. And in their function, they describe genuinely different political traditions.
Perhaps the enduring mistake is to assume that every demand for a functioning society must first belong to an ideology before it can belong to ordinary life.
A decent home. Work that leaves something at the end of the month. A doctor when you are sick. A good school nearby. Public transport that works. Security in old age. The ability to raise children without treating every unexpected bill as a crisis.
Some people will call the programme required to provide those things social democracy. Some will call it democratic socialism. Others reach many of the same institutions through entirely different political traditions.
I have always had a simpler description.
Common sense.
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Please recruit all your Hungarian amigos to come to the U.S. and teach us how to get rid of our Hideous Orange Fascist Freak - that should obviously be dead already. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.