This picture is misleading when applied to today’s populists like Mr. Orban. In Hungary, it is not just the rule of law that has been under threat. Rights essential for democracy itself — especially rights to free speech, free assembly and free association — have been systematically attacked. As media pluralism disappears, citizens cannot get critical information to make up their minds about their government’s record. Unless one wants to say that a democracy remains a democracy as long as the government does not stuff the ballot boxes on Election Day, it is crucial to insist that democracy itself is being damaged.

Unless this point is understood, Mr. Orban will continue the perfidious game he likes to play with international critics in particular: He does not mind being called “illiberal”; he relishes it. For liberalism is supposedly just a matter of subjective value choices: Liberals, he and his defenders will say, simply do not like his conservative family policies, his defense of strong nation-states inside the European Union and, most of all, his complete rejection of immigration. Of course, one can legitimately disagree about these issues in a democracy. But by focusing all attention on them, Mr. Orban has remade what should be a debate about democratic institutions into yet another culture war. (This is a strategy Trumpists are also discovering.) Once the conflict has been declared a matter of subjective values, it becomes easy to accuse the liberals of being the real illiberals. Even though they are supposed to be the defenders of diversity, they cannot tolerate an ethnic nationalist like Mr. Orban, who seeks to deviate from a supposed Western mainstream of multiculturalism.

A number of observers are even willing to concede that “illiberal democracy” might be a somewhat legitimate reaction to undemocratic liberalism. The European Union appears as an obvious instance of a liberal technocracy against which “the will of the people” needs to be asserted. But the European Union prescribes neither a uniform legislative stance on controversial questions like same-sex marriage nor a single model of democracy. Its members just have to be democratic enough.

When European Union leaders have criticized Hungary and, more recently, Poland, those countries’ governments have countered that they are defending national sovereignty against liberal diktats from Brussels. The Union has played into their hands by suggesting that it is only concerned about the liberal rule of law. The European Union thus gives the impression that democracy will always be taken care of by the nation-state; and the technocratic liberal repair crew from Brussels only makes a call in a European capital, if there is a malfunction with the rule of law (hence the undermining of political rights and independent institutions appears like a technical glitch, not as the conscious authoritarian project it actually is.)

The notion of “illiberal democracy” has also made it easier for European elites to claim that the people themselves have unfortunately turned out to be illiberal and brought these authoritarian governments on themselves. Eastern Europeans, we are often told, are culturally different — code for thinking that they lag behind Western liberal enlightenment. But the citizens who brought Mr. Orban and the current Polish government to power actually did exactly what democratic theory would have counseled them to do: In two-party systems, they threw out the one major party that had a poor record and instead voted for politicians who, in both cases, presented themselves as moderate mainstream conservatives. The latter never revealed — or won an electoral mandate for — their real agenda, of perpetuating themselves in power by attacking the institutions that underpin democracy.