There was no criticism of Kaczynski or his illiberal steps. I was told the Polish government feels empowered by Trump.

Nor have Poland or Hungary felt remotely threatened by the European Union, whose censure of the countries’ turn against liberal democracy has been prudent to the point of feebleness. The billions of dollars still going to Warsaw and Budapest from Brussels should be diverted elsewhere for now. The union rests, by treaty, on the principles of “democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”

The democratic West needs to awaken from its slumber. The forgotten people of the post-1989 decades have spoken. They have embraced disruption at any cost, declaring “Enough!” to the economic prescriptions (mainly austerity) and the smug impunity of globalizing elites. Europe cannot open its doors to everyone. It needs a shared immigration policy that works, economic policies that offset rather than accentuate inequality and a Brussels bureaucracy that delivers tangible results to a half-billion Europeans.

The worst is not inevitable. Orban could yet lose (Fidesz suffered a surprising local election defeat recently), but that is a long shot. Poland lags behind Hungary in the descent into authoritarianism. It is bigger, more diverse and more hostile to Putin’s Russia for historical reasons. It has a stronger civil society and retains a more vigorous independent media. These are important distinctions. They provide some hope.

But Europe’s drift is ominous. “I have the weird sense this is the future — it feels like the transition to something new,” Michael Ignatieff, the president of the Budapest-based and Soros-funded Central European University, told me of Orban’s ascendant illiberalism. The university, a symbol of academic freedom conceived to anchor Central Europe in the West by providing a liberal education, is under threat of closing by Orban.

When I asked Zoltan Kovacs, Orban’s spokesman, why the government uses anti-Semitic riffs against Soros, he said: “We’re not riffing on his Jewishness. We’re riffing on what he does as a speculator, spending dubious money for his cosmopolitan conception of the globe.”

This is the new-old language of Europe today. Marcin Matczak, the law professor I met in Poland, told me: “The young take liberty for granted. They never had to fight for it.”