Radio Free Europe plans to return to Hungary — a quarter-century after the US-government broadcaster left the small Central European country following the end of the Cold War. As The New York Times reported last month, the move “is likely to be taken as something of an affront to the current government.”

No kidding. The Times article ran under the grave headline: “Radio Free Europe Is Poised to Return to a Less Free Hungary,” and it gravely noted that the proposal “reflects Hungary’s drift away from a free and open government and is a blow” to Team Trump’s outreach to Budapest.

The liberal foreign-policy establishment frets that Hungary has drifted away from the community of democracies under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But Orbán is, in fact, wildly popular. What Washington’s “defend-democracy” types really fear is that Hungary has become less liberal — not less democratic.

Which is why they want to spend your tax dollars to persuade errant Hungarians to vote better (though they would never put it so bluntly).

Neither the insult nor the ham-fisted nature of the outreach has escaped the Hungarians. “It is heavily unfair to say there is no freedom in Hungary,” Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó told me in an interview at the Hungarian consulate last week. “Radio Free Europe gets it wrong if they think Hungarians will give their outlet a positive reception.”

It was Radio Free Europe that in 1956 urged Hungarians to revolt against the Soviet occupation, promising that American military support was around the corner. Tens of thousands gave their lives; the US help never came. Szijjártó says with a smile: “So the biggest piece of fake news ever circulated in Hungary came from Radio Free Europe.”

Szijjártó was in the town for the UN General Assembly, and if it irritated him to have to constantly defend the legitimacy of the most electorally and economically successful Christian-Democratic government in Europe, he didn’t show it.

Wired, quick-thinking and nimble with English, Szijjártó embodies the confidence of a new Hungary — even as that allusion to 1956 reflects Hungarians’ (not unjustified) tendency to view their modern history as a sequence of grievances and betrayals suffered at the hands of outsiders.

That new Hungary has a distinct and substantive vision of politics: The goal isn’t to promote liberal rights and procedures, including European Union integration, for their own sake. Rather, leaders in Budapest (and Warsaw and elsewhere) are determined to promote the economic well-being of their people, reverse demographic decline and restore Christian cultures badly damaged by a century of war and totalitarianism.

That’s why President Trump’s foreign-policy themes — resisting the “false song of globalism” — resonate in the region, even if the cunning, highly literate Orbán has done a much better job of actually enacting a conservative-nationalist agenda than Trump has.

Much as Trump and Trumpians bristle at liberals’ underhanded efforts to undo the outcome of the 2016 election, Hungary’s leaders have had it with Western liberal condescension and tutelage, most of it coming from Brussels.

“We are fed up with all kinds of approaches that end up in attempts to interfere in our domestic affairs,” Szijjártó tells me. “We expect the international community to appreciate the Hungarian people are mature and smart enough to make their own decisions about the future of their own country.”

When, in 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel flung open Europe’s gates to more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa, Orbán fortified his border. And when the European Union required member-states to resettle the newcomers, whether they liked it or not, Orbán told the Brussels mandarins to go hang it.

“When it comes to making the European Union strong again, it starts with changing the policy on migration,” the foreign minister says. “We should look at strengthening the EU’s external borders. And instead of encouraging people to come to Europe, we should bring help where it is needed. We Hungarians bring help where it is needed, and we don’t bring problems where there are no problems.”

Voters across vast swaths of Europe would agree with the Hungarian position, but they labor under governments that are more committed to abstract notions of freedom of movement than they are to carrying out the popular will. Hungary’s leadership in this sense is more democratic than most of the countries that lecture Budapest about democracy.

The Hungarians also reject the liberal vision according to which Europe is nothing more than a legal and geographic entity with no particular cultural or civilizational content. “We want to see a strong EU based on strong members,” Szijjártó says. “And that means members that are proud of their religious heritage. And it is obvious for us that we have to give priority to Christian culture in Europe.”

He goes on: “Our constitution starts with the word God: ‘God bless Hungarians.’ In our constitution, we recognize the role Christianity has been playing in maintaining our statehood.” That liberal opinion would stigmatize Hungary for honoring the Continent’s Christian patrimony only underscores liberal elites’ extreme secularist cast of mind.

Hungary’s commitment to a substantive civilizational vision plays out in state policy. “When we say we are Christian Democrats,” states Szijjártó, “we don’t just say it because we want to occupy one particular spot in the political spectrum. We truly mean it. And if you are deeply rooted in a Christian heritage, you know you have to support families and working people. And we made a clear choice: that we don’t want migration, but we want families to be stronger.”

Declining total fertility was high on the government’s list of concerns when Orbán returned to power in 2010 (he first held the premiership from 1998 to 2002). “The question of whether to have another child was for many families an economic question,” Szijjártó recalls. “And this is something we wanted to change. The principle is that those who have children can’t be in a worse spot just because they have children, compared to those who are childless.”

To reverse demographic course, the Orbán government introduced a series of reforms in the tax code aimed at encouraging larger families: Women who have at least four children are exempt from income taxes for the rest of their lives; families with at least three children receive cash assistance toward the purchase of vans; the government also offers them low-interest loans toward housing expenses.

The result: Hungary’s fertility rate has jumped to 1.8, up from 1.4 in 2010.

At the same time, however, the government has introduced low, flat taxes — 15 percent on personal income, 9 percent on corporate earnings — on the ground that “those who wish to work and earn more are able to do so,” as Szijjártó says. The supply-side wisdom has born fruit: The jobless rate stands at 3.5 percent, or close to full employment, down from 12.5 percent at the dawn of the Orbán era.

Hungary’s pro-family programs ruffle free-marketeer feathers, while its tax policies don’t make the country popular among progressives. But the Hungarians have no desire to impose their vision on the rest of Europe; all they ask is to be left alone by Washington and Brussels to pursue their vision of the good society.

The Orbán government isn’t without fault — what government is? Its attempts to renegotiate Hungary’s wartime history, painting the country as a blameless victim of the Nazis, are particularly troubling and, well, ahistorical: Hungary was an Axis ally. It helped the Germans deport more than a half a million Jews to death camps. Hungarians can sometimes get carried away with their sense of victimhood.

But even here, the picture isn’t as simplistic as Budapest’s contemporary critics frame it. Last year, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warmly welcomed Orbán. Why? Because Hungary along with Romania and the Czech Republic helped block a European Union resolution denouncing Team Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

It wasn’t the first time the Hungarians have come to the Jewish state’s aid at the EU’s anti-Israel councils. In 2015, for example, Szijjártó announced that his country would defy an EU directive to affix labels on products from the West Bank and Golan Heights settlements. The order, he said at the time, was simply “irrational.”

As Szijjártó tells me, “with Israel, we have a strategic friendship and alliance, which had a huge boost thanks to the personal relationship between the two prime ministers. We have promised to open a trade mission in Jerusalem, which we delivered.”

As for the Jewish community in Hungary, it is among the safest in Europe. Thirty-seven anti-Semitic incidents were reported to the community watchdog in 2017 — none of them violent. Next-door Austria, with a Jewish community one-tenth the size of Hungary’s, had five physical assaults and more than 500 incidents. Hungarian synagogues, Szijjártó proudly boasts, “don’t need heavily armed soldiers.”

The journalists and think tankers obsessed with the rise of populism and conservative nationalism might ponder why it is that such governments continue to garner broad popular support — and why so many voters are turning their back against liberalism across the developed world.

At any rate, Orbán and Orbánism are going nowhere anytime soon, Radio Free Europe’s new efforts notwithstanding. It might be time to listen instead of lecture. As Szijjártó says, “These debates play out very emotionally, and those who aren’t within the mainstream are stigmatized immediately.” Liberals, he adds, “must accept that it isn’t just the mainstream that has the right to express its opinions.”

What he fails to recognize, perhaps, is that he now represents the mainstream.

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor.