Rallying around the (Progress Pride) Flag

The European Right must learn to hate Trump

Fifth century Athens was the glory of the ancient world, the great democracy which led the Greek states to victory against the Persians. While today lauded as the political ancestor of our own system, critics of democracy at the time feared that this sort of mob rule led to bad decision-making and, indeed, the excitable Athenian democracy came to make crucial mistakes.

Athens was not a very benevolent regional hegemon, extorting money from smaller allies in the Delian League in order to fund its public buildings, and often acting brutally: on one notorious occasion its democracy voted for the mass execution of Mytilenean men who had rebelled - before changing their minds the next day, and sending a boat to countermand the order. Facing the rising threat of an oligarchical, authoritarian rival, Athens needlessly alienated its democratic allies through its bullying and financial demands. It proved fatal.

Modern democracies are far luckier with their hegemon, and Europe has spent decades living under the most benevolent and indulgent global power in history - while treating it with all the gratitude of a spoiled teenager. Now they’re about to learn just how good they had it.

As Gerry Lynch recently wrote, the old order may dying, but we don’t know what’s following it. Quoting Kissinger’s line that Trump is one of those figures who makes the end of an era, Lynch noted that ‘Europeans, including British Brexiteers, are having to confront the fact that their delusions to sovereignty and autonomy were always dependent on free-riding on the force of American arms.’ The new regime does not value the western alliance so highly, and even sees NATO as symbolising ‘a cold-blooded technocracy which despises national differentiation and forbids dissent of from expert orthodoxies.’ This presents serious problems for Europeans, but perhaps most of all for those Europeans who share that view of a technocracy which has become increasingly undemocratic.

The American president is reaching levels of global unpopularity previously thought impossible, and with good reason. His tariffs might cause a global recession, and appear mean-spirited where they aren’t simply irrational; taxes against poor, weak countries like Cambodia trying to work their way out of poverty may be done to bring back American jobs, but they come across like the worst kind of bullying.

Trump’s predatory behaviour in Greenland is mad, bad and dangerous; his rhetoric against Canada scarcely believable. His attitude towards Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky horrified voters across the spectrum in Britain. (Whether his actual policies are less immoral than those of the Biden administration and European countries is another matter, but tone goes a long way).

Remarkably, the prediction markets estimates a 30 per cent probability of the US acquiring a part of Greenland, and since the Danes won’t sell under any circumstances, a lot of people clearly think that the Americans will take it by force. I can’t believe Trump would do something so reckless and damaging… but as I type that sentence out I begin to have my doubts.

The result is that, everywhere, Trump is helping incumbents. Canada’s Liberals have come back from the dead in part thanks to the US president’s bizarre hostility to his northern neighbour, and Canadian Eric Kaufmann has pointed out that the American president’s foreign policy is weakening populism abroad.

There is a rallying around the flag effect, the flag in question being the Progress Pride banner of global progressivism. Rather than aiding a western vibe shift, Trump’s form of American nationalism is weakening the European right – and they know it. Already, as political scientist Marlene Wind wrote in the Danish-language magazine Berlingske (which I’m able to read courtesy of Google, an American company obviously) European populists like Marine Le Pen are distancing themselves from Trump. Tory frontbencher Robert Jenrick has been perhaps the most outspoken figure on the British right to criticise the US leader over Ukraine, which seems wise, since British voters dislike his bullying tone and ambivalence about the Ukraine war.

If I were Keir Starmer, I would be issuing statements of solidarity with our Danish friends over Greenland and showing that Britain is 100 per cent behind them. If Trump retaliated and escalated the row, as he might well do, this would only make the prime minister more popular - but I imagine that he lacks the political nous and showmanship to take this gamble.