Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  In her view, authoritarianism is not a consistent or ever-present personality trait; it is latent and activated by perceived threats to the comfort and familiarity of the status quo. As she argues, “Sometimes authoritarians behave like authoritarians but at other times are indistinguishable from the pack.”16

  Rapid immigration and the arrival of significant numbers of people from distinctly different cultures—especially when they bring different values and norms—is seen as a threat by certain people and activates their authoritarian predisposition, prompting them to resist.17 Populist right-wing parties, whether intentionally or not, have masterfully exploited this reflex, painting themselves as the only ones who are listening to these voters’ grievances and can preserve the stable order these voters cherish. The close ties between the AZC-Alert activists and the PVV in Holland are a case in point.

  Stenner’s research included the manipulation of subjects by using fabricated news stories designed to trigger their authoritarian reflex, a remarkably prescient research technique given the prevalence and influence of fake news stories in the 2016 election cycle. She found that “authoritarians will clamor for authoritative constraints on racial diversity, political dissent, and moral deviance under conditions of normative threat,” by which she means clashing values and beliefs within a society and the perceived failures of its leaders.

  On the other hand, they will not display these reactions when they feel reassured by unified public opinion and shared confidence in leaders.18 The Swedish sociologist Jens Rydgren, writing on the rise of far-right parties in Scandinavia, came to a very similar conclusion. He found that “fragmentation of the culture” and “widespread political discontent and disenchantment” were predictors of voting for parties like Denmark’s DPP.19

  One of Stenner’s more bizarre but telling findings is that authoritarians immediately abandoned hostility to immigrants and minorities when faced with an even more distant outside threat—in this case, the (fake) news of extraterrestrial sightings—which she regards as “a powerful demonstration of the potential for, and the potential benefits of, effectively altering the boundaries of ‘us.’” Without actually harming any group regarded as outsiders, “the mere conjuring of some kind of greater difference,” shifts authoritarian voters’ reactions.20

  Those with authoritarian reflexes are highly susceptible to political myth and will at a certain stage support an overthrow of the established order if led by a trusted leader promising renewal and salvation; traditional conservatives will not. If anything, they can be “liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements,” protecting the status quo from demagogic promises of deliverance.21 It is a fairly accurate description of Angela Merkel or Republican leaders and intellectuals from John McCain to Max Boot during the Trump campaign and early days of his administration.

  Even so, the soil in 2017 is fertile for demagogues. “Unconstrained diversity,” Stenner writes, “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.”22 To simply write these people off as racists is to miss the point and forsake any chance of winning the political battle with far-right parties.

  Those who see themselves as globalists cheered when Merkel opened Germany’s borders, but for the nationalists, like those protesting outside Dutch asylum centres, it was confirmation of their worst fears.23 For Stenner’s predisposed authoritarians, the uncontrolled arrival and government-decreed resettlement of large numbers of refugees was the ultimate threat to their perceived community.

  It’s absurd, the Dutch intellectual Paul Scheffer argues, to be a liberal country in a deeply illiberal neighborhood and simply open up the gates. “History has not ended,” he says, referring to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. Europeans are surrounded by countries like Libya, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Ukraine. Policy makers need to move beyond crisis management and come up with a real vision.

  The popular idea on the left that everyone should be able to move as they please is a rejection of the nation-state. The notion that citizens, whether long-standing or newly naturalized, should not enjoy any special rights over and above those enjoyed by noncitizens is exactly the sort of threat to the social order that triggers Stenner’s latent authoritarians. If a passport means nothing and being born somewhere doesn’t entitle you to any privileges in that place, it is the equivalent of charging a 100 percent inheritance tax on every family or a government spending as much on foreign medical aid as it does on health care for its own citizens, something that not even the radical left advocates.

  Scheffer believes populism is “all about borders in the end. It’s about protection, and if a state or a collection of states like the European Union doesn’t offer protection, then you get withdrawal.” He worries that others will fill the void. As President Trump signs executive orders to halt visas for visitors from several Muslim-majority nations, Scheffer’s warning seems increasingly relevant. Politicians must “attempt to bring some order to it, because if migration is seen as a symbol of a world out of control, people will restore control,” he warns. “And if it’s not with liberal means it will be with authoritarian means.”24

  As voters inclined toward authoritarian solutions perceive a threat to the nation and community they love, they react. Immigrants from Muslim countries have activated the backlash because they come not only with strange clothes and customs, but, like Orthodox Jews, they also make public requests for accommodations like single-sex transport, gender-segregated swimming pools, or special meals.25 Whether or not these requests are reasonable, they are precisely the sort of threat to sameness that Stenner warns of. Once politicians exploit voters’ fears, it can lead to “the kind of intolerance that seems to ‘come out of nowhere,’” she writes. It is a reaction that produces “sudden changes in behavior that cannot be accounted for by slowly changing cultural traditions.”26

  In France, a country that stresses shared republican values, this dynamic has played out over the past few decades, and the fear of visible difference has had a clear electoral impact. Marine Le Pen has capitalized on it. A population trained to assume that everyone would assimilate quickly and easily saw that things were moving slowly in the realm of integration. Just as the FN was gaining strength, “a certain discourse on tolerance came clattering down from the elites towards the French lower classes” demanding that they respect the differences of immigrants, writes the sociologist Emmanuel Todd. “At the very same time as the lower classes were worried by the slowness of assimilation, their rulers were proclaiming that this assimilation was not necessary.” As a result, they turned their resentment toward Arabs who were visibly different, while some immigrants turned their wrath toward the visible difference of orthodox Jews.27

  In Todd’s view, the new wave of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism has its roots in France’s doctrinaire interpretation of republican egalitarianism, where sameness is sanctified, even when real equality doesn’t exist. Taking this logic to its extreme, he argues, if “human beings are the same everywhere, if the foreigners setting foot on our soil behave in ways that really are different, the reason is that they are not really human.” The result of this “hysterical form of egalitarianism” is rejection of those who are perceived as not being similar but should be.28

  Stenner sees the excessive celebration of difference so popular among multiculturalists as preparing the ground for backlash because, she argues, it “generates the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected, expressions of intolerance.”

  It is a theory that has profound political implications. If politicians can celebrate the inclusion of immigrants as part of a shared national community—the sort of national unity often fostered by diverse national sports teams, for example—it could damage the populist right. If not, a backlash of Stenner’s latent authoritari
ans is a real risk.29 They are already mobilizing.

  Edwin Wagenveld is convinced that Europe is being taken over by Muslims, and he intends to resist. Although he has lived in Germany for many years, he returns to Holland every so often to lead PEGIDA demonstrations in his homeland.

  In April 2016, we met at a hotel on the outskirts of The Hague, known best as the favorite haunt of Hans Janmaat, one of Holland’s pioneering anti-immigration figures. Wagenveld was planning a demonstration in the capital the following morning and was trying to minimize the chances of neo-Nazis showing up, who he intended to tell they were not welcome, from the podium. Although Geert Wilders did once give a speech at a PEGIDA rally in Dresden, a fact Wagenveld is very proud of, he tries to steer clear of politics. Some on the far right have asked him to run for office, he tells me, but he’s not interested. “I’m a protest movement; I’m not a party,” he insists.30

  Wagenveld spoke directly with Paul Belien, one of Wilders’s speech-writers and spokesmen, to plan the Dresden rally and claims to have frequent contact with other PVV officials. He calls their ties “informal.”31 “I speak with a lot of people from the PVV. I speak with political people. I speak with voters.” A few weeks before our meeting, he gave a speech at a protest in The Hague. “A few people from the PVV, political people, come to me, had heard my speech, and say, ‘You are exactly saying what we are thinking,’ and so I know,” he tells me with pride.

  He was hoping that there would be “maybe a little bit more working together,” he says, but he sees PEGIDA as a street movement that has latitude politicians don’t. “We can say a little bit more than the politicals say,” he says with a smile. “On the street in Dresden, you have a lot of voice,” more than in a parliament, he believes.

  And the politicians know they need PEGIDA supporters to boost their numbers. He gives PEGIDA credit for changing the debate in Germany. “What we were saying on the podium in 2014 … now the politicians are saying the same. We say border closing, and now they did it. We say less refugees, and now they do it. I think we opened the discussion,” insists Wagenveld. He wants to do the same in Holland.32

  Wagenveld sees himself as unusually prescient. “What I am saying always is maybe my eyes are a little bit faster. I open them earlier than you,” he tells politicians. He is originally from the pleasant university town of Utrecht, where Wilders also got his start as a city council member. Wagenveld depicts the city of canals and Roman-era cathedrals as a sort of apocalyptic Islamic wasteland. Twenty years ago, you never saw Muslims, he tells me. “Now, you go in the supermarket, people see the scarf.”33

  It is the spectre of gradual colonization that Great Replacement theorist Renaud Camus writes about. And for Camus, PEGIDA is the hero of the moment. In his essay, “PEGIDA, Mon Amour,” he praises the overtly Islamophobic group as “a great hope rising in the East” and a “liberation front” that is fighting the “anti-colonialist struggle.” For him, there is no hope of living together in Europe when “there is a colonial conquest in progress, in which we are the colonized indigenous people” and the weapons of sheer numbers and demographic substitution are used to subjugate the natives.34

  Wagenveld doesn’t have much time for theory, but he resents the lack of political action. “After Pim Fortuyn, they told us, ‘We will change something.’ Nothing changed,” he says. The lack of community reaction after the Brussels attacks outraged Wagenveld. In the eyes of PEGIDA sympathizers, whose worldview paints all Muslims as part of the problem like the Charlie Hebdo editorial after the Brussels attack, it is evidence that the whole community must be complicit.

  When I ask about making halal meat available in schools, he is adamant that it must be forbidden. “We have to make it difficult for them to live like a radical Islam.” He is at least consistent in his application of prohibitions, unlike some selective secularists in France. Asked whether his preferred measures would apply to Jews, too, he is clear. “You can’t make a difference between Jewish, Christian, or Muslims. That’s discrimination. When the scarf is forbidden, also the kippah is forbidden.”35

  As extreme as PEGIDA is in many people’s eyes, they can’t stand groups and individuals they regard as extremists. He calls people like the Norwegian white supremacist mass murderer Anders Breivik “stupid idiots” who make it more difficult for activists like himself. He urges his followers to be peaceful and calm, and then people like Breivik come along and ruin it. If a few members of neo-Nazi parties join a PEGIDA march and play by his rules, that’s fine, he tells me, but he wants nothing to do with their leaders.

  Wagenveld is dismissive of some of the other anti-immigrant groups like AZC-Alert, though he generally agrees with them. “I only work with people that are doing something in real life. Facebook is easy,” he says derisively.

  As Wagenveld explains, he doesn’t need the government or local authorities to tell him where asylum-seekers are housed; he finds out himself. If he wants to organize a protest, he simply follows refugees home. “I don’t need an address where AZC is. I go to the marketplace, and I wait until the first group is starting to walk. I walk behind them, and I find where the AZC is.”36

  Wagenveld is an interesting and unusual spokesman for a vehemently anti-immigrant group. He himself is an immigrant—albeit a Dutch one in a country next door. On the issue of identity, his view is both rigid and revealing. When I ask if the situation would be better if young minorities were made to feel Dutch before Moroccan or Turkish, he replied, “Yeah, but you can only feel Dutch when you are Dutch,” going on to explain his own time in Germany, where everyone sees him as a foreigner. “For more than twenty years already in Germany. I can’t be German. I think I need a few things to get 100 percent that identity. You have to be born here, or maybe come when you’re two or three years old.… When you have a Moroccan culture, then I think it’s not possible to say, ‘I’m Dutch.’”

  What Wagenveld seems to miss is that it’s much easier for a white Dutchman to be accepted in Germany than for a nonwhite Moroccan to be accepted in Holland.

  His family, he insists, is different. His kids speak German at home; when they drive over the border to Holland, they speak Dutch. When I ask if there’s anything the state can do to integrate new immigrants more successfully, Wagenveld is blunt: “I think that time is over. There is no turnback point anymore.”37

  11

  THEY’RE STEALING OUR JOBS

  In early 2016, as Wagenveld was organizing PEGIDA protests to keep Muslims out of Holland, a group of freshly arrived refugees found themselves languishing in an AZC shelter, the kind of place on the edge of town that right-wing activists like to locate, protest, and occasionally burn down. The refugees were from Syria and Afghanistan and eager to start new lives. “They were doctors; they were dentists. Everything about them was academic,” recalls Tanja Jadnanansing, then a Labour MP. “They were talking to me because they were asking me, ‘What can we do? We get really tired of sitting in this shelter. We want to work.’”1

  What was once a resentment of guest workers has now morphed into full-scale blame of refugees and foreigners stealing locals’ jobs. In Holland, as in Denmark, this is causing tension on the left because of the risk it could pose to Dutch workers, especially if the refugees are paid a lower wage. They are generally not allowed to work for six months, and when they do, like a Syrian tailor and dentist profiled in the New York Times, they often do it for a significantly lower wage than their Dutch counterparts in the same professions.2 While refugees may resent working for half the wage of natives, most of the skilled refugees Jadnanansing met “were just begging me, ‘Let us work.’”

  Both governments have made the same mistake when it comes to integrating refugees and immigrants; welfare states don’t want people on the streets. Much like the Danish government’s decision to park refugees and asylum-seekers—some of them highly skilled—on welfare, the authorities have often remedied the visible problem while leaving the invisible one to fester. “You don’t want to
have them as beggars in the stations. So you give them money, you give them a flat, and you say, “Keep out of our lives,” says Paul Schnabel, the former head of Holland’s Institute for Social Research, which helps shape social policy.3

  The risk today is new arrivals who are young and uneducated being left out of the job market or relegated to doing nothing. In contrast to the children of those who came in the 1970s who are excelling in universities and public life, the latest wave is being left on the sidelines of the labour market, and it is a recipe for disaster. “If you want to have problems in society, you should have young male migrants who don’t have work,” Schnabel argues. They should be in school or in jobs. “If they are left to themselves, they become really a nuisance and even more dangerous than that.”4

  In both Holland and Denmark, the idea of paying lower entry-level wages to refugees who don’t yet have language skills or local educational qualifications has been proposed as a possible solution, but both the left and the right have generally opposed it.

  As more refugees entered Denmark in 2015, the issue of work became a dividing line in politics. The DPP and some unions railed about immigrants pushing Danes out of the workforce. A coalition of strange bedfellows has emerged from the right to the far left to support getting new arrivals into the workforce as soon as possible rather than putting them on welfare.

  The risk of competition and conflict in the labour market has confused and divided the left, which likes to view itself both as supportive of needy refugees and a defender of the working class. When refugees arrive in a new country, they tend to gravitate toward the capital and largest cities. In Copenhagen and its suburbs, there are fewer and fewer unskilled jobs available for Danes without an education or for foreigners who lack the language skills and qualifications to get skilled work. Much like parts of the Rust Belt in the United States, where manufacturing jobs have been replaced by a knowledge economy, the sort of stable blue-collar jobs that were once abundant have disappeared. “The old production facilities, they’re gone. They’re now in China or in Eastern Europe,” says the mayor of Herlev, Thomas Gyldal Petersen. “Those companies, they’re gone. What is left is jobs for highly educated people.”