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.

‘Paddington Bear, The Great British Bake Off, Mo Farah’s left leg, Mo Farah’s right leg…’

National populism in Europe shares similarities with Trumpism but its differences are also notable. For one, it is much more openly anti-immigration. In his book Whiteshift, Kaufmann quoted surveys showing that 47 per cent of white Hillary Clinton voters believed it to be racist to not want your group share to decline, while just 12 per cent of Trump voters agreed. Trump voters are to some extent motivated by racial ‘anxiety’, but the same research showed that Britons were far more overtly concerned about this issue than Americans, and the British are among the more liberal Europeans.

The rise of European populism is childishly simple: it is not driven by insecurity, neoliberalism or inequality but by extreme immigration policies drastically changing a continent which has never been a ‘nation of immigrants’. Across the West, we are ruled by immigration extremists, and European voters do not want this and reason that it has already made their lives much worse, their countries poorer, less safe and more alien to them. US vice-president JD Vance was correct to state that immigration threatens Europe, and the Danes agree.

Populism is a derogatory term but populists represent the ‘people’ against a governing class who don’t really believe in the concept anymore, or at the least don’t believe in any link between a functioning nation-state and a dominant ethnic group. It’s not a coincidence that liberalism and democracy emerged in countries which were relatively homogenous (although I don’t like the simplicity of the word) whereas in multi-ethnic states people power is disastrous, usually violent.

Democracy and empire are incompatible, and in imperial and post-imperial societies people vote along ethnic or sectarian lines and use the polling both as a way to extract money from ethnic rivals and raise the prestige of their own group. It’s already clear that, so long as Europe’s demography continues its current path, we are heading down that route - and it is going to get worse.

It is because they seem themselves as custodians of a new form of liberal empire that mainstream political leaders increasingly move decisions away from elected bodies and place power in the hands of undemocratic arm’s-length organisations. It was one such organisation, the Sentencing Council, which in Britain recently tried to instigate explicitly two-tier rules about bail. This body, like so many of the unaccountable organisations that comprise our cold-blooded technocracy, is a recent innovation.

With a ruling class so opposed to their interests, it is hardly surprising that voters turn to populists. Whether it is explicit or not, European populism is more overtly ethnic than the American variation - and in some ways this makes it less volatile or dangerous.

The European Right are not interested in national greatness; they don’t want territorial gains; they don’t want the world to bend to them; they want good relations with their neighbours. They just don’t want their countries to be overrun by foreigners, and in particular violently hostile foreigners. In order to win and rule, they will need to eschew Trumpism, with its drama, bullying, performative masculinity and rhetorical extremes, towards a more Scandinavian style of national populism involving moderate women in pantsuits. Deportations, but announced in a reasonable, sensible singsong voice.

Sweden, which has experienced perhaps the most unsuccessful experiment in mass immigration anywhere, is already leading the way, paying undesirable migrants to leave and denaturalising criminals. They have managed to do this without alienating the entire world, sacrificing their famously ethical foreign policy or threatening to invade their neighbours. Indeed, they only recently joined the anti-Putin NATO alliance.

These are early days, but the results will be watched elsewhere in Europe, and certainly a right-wing government in Britain which followed suit would be immensely popular. But the tone really does matter; there is no need to defend a country’s borders in a mood of such needless cruelty, as the Trump regime chooses to do, mocking those whose dreams have been ruined.

Conor Fitzgerald recently wrote about the calculated cruelty of the new Right and observed that because a more feminised Left takes empathy to extremes, ‘right-wing or at least “non-liberal” people are sometimes too eager to give in to the idea that they are the party of cruelty. The party of emotional blackmail has been the one setting the cultural tone for so long they are still understood as hegemonic by their opponents, who often struggle as themselves as anything more a negative mirror image. It’s a small-time, Own the Libs mentality - your enemy sees themselves as good and kind and delicate, and because they dictate the field of play, by necessity you must see yourself as nasty and cruel and careless of people’s feelings.’

This is not going to win, in my view, especially when the Right needs to make their ideas head up the respectability cascade. There is also the obvious risk that Trump's destruction of the economy discredits the prevention of illegal immigration or the battle against affirmative action.

Populism comes with enormous inherent dangers, especially the temperament of the people drawn to it, often vindictive or incompetent, or simply mad. Populist parties are driven by large numbers concerned about immigration, but they contain an activist core obsessed by fringe issues like vaccine injuries and the World Economic Forum. In Britain, the Reform Party’s proposed policies on housebuilding and energy do not fill one with huge amounts of confidence.

But the biggest danger remains that, by appearing too soft on Trump and Putin, the Right allows the liberal centre to carry the flag and to present Trump as the biggest threat to the European Way of Life. Looking around at almost every major city west of the old Iron Curtain, that clearly isn’t the case.