Fear of decline and of small numbers can be a powerful political force, especially when a group accustomed to being on top sees its power wane while an opportunistic leader fuels the fears and resentments of its members.9 A few months before Trump’s victory, Jones wrote in the Atlantic, “It is the disappearance of white Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions.”10 It would be naive to ignore them, because many members of this group are perfectly capable of fighting a rearguard battle to preserve their dominance.
It is an argument at the core of J. D. Vance’s devastating memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance grew up in Appalachia and the Rust Belt, desperate places where heroin addiction is widespread and a majority struggle to make ends meet against a backdrop of shuttered factories and desolate downtowns.11
Trump has filled a void precisely because, as Vance argued in an interview, “the two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues.… From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth,” a tone-deaf approach, Vance insists, when the local small business owner has just fired your brother. Suddenly, Trump comes along, a guy who relishes attacking elites and openly criticizes companies that outsource jobs. His campaign was music to their ears.12
Just as white Christian America was fading into minority status—the sort of power transition that leads to war between nations according to certain international relations theorists—Obama was elected.13 A well-dressed, well-educated black president who was a good father and whose wife told Middle America to stop feeding their kids junk added to this sense of smallness and being eclipsed.14
Studies after the 2016 election showed that it was not just economic resentment but cultural anxiety—a fear that an America these voters knew and had once dominated was disappearing—that drove the election results. Trump’s numbers among white working-class voters with such anxieties were staggering; after he skillfully stoked their rage, 80 percent of those who felt things had changed so much that they felt like strangers in their own country supported Trump in 2016.15
The New York and Washington echo chambers that elites and intellectuals from both parties inhabit are very different from the world these voters live in. In their world, there is little trust in the press, and there’s no check on the Internet conspiracy theories that have come to rule the digital world.16 Today’s meritocracy, by contrast, has become a circle of winners that listens only to itself. When those outside this winner’s circle “come to view all formal authority as fraudulent, good governance becomes impossible,” writes the MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes, setting off “a vicious cycle of official misconduct and low expectations.”17
Only by listening to and understanding marginalized voters’ rage can activists and mainstream politicians hope to win them back. The left so far has failed to make them a better offer, and belittling them doesn’t help.18 Considering that a large number of Trump voters in Michigan and Wisconsin voted for Obama at least once if not twice, getting them to return to the fold matters.
The alternative is far worse; denouncing and disparaging these voters can, eventually, lead to a desire for authoritarian solutions, especially when major media institutions are distrusted by large sections of the population. “If the experts as a whole are discredited,” Hayes wrote in 2012, “we are faced with an inexhaustible supply of quackery.”19
Those lines perfectly anticipated the Trump campaign of 2016 and the culture of distrust that made it possible. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the head of the rabble-rousing right-wing site Breitbart News and a great admirer of Jean Raspail, to run his campaign after the revelations about his Putin-coddling campaign manager, Paul Manafort, became too much of a liability. A purveyor of fringe quackery had reached the inner circle of a major party’s presidential campaign and then secured a key role in the White House.
On the morning of April 23, as the polls opened in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, an old man with a cane positioned himself in front of a bright yellow mailbox and began to scrape. After a few minutes, he sauntered away toward the markets of the rue des Martyrs, leaving a torn and scratched relic of the modified hammer-and-sickle logo of the hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, France Insoumise (Rebellious or, literally, “Unsubmissive” France).
The old man, no fan of Mélenchon’s anticapitalist, anti-NATO, pro-Russian rhetoric, had reason to worry. In neighborhoods like this, the epicentre of Paris hipsterdom, Mélenchon polled well. Everyone from student protesters to academics and the well-to-do scions of one of the city’s wealthiest families told me they were voting for the ex-communist firebrand. His soaring oratory and rage at the system captivated the left and almost propelled him into the second round; he finished with almost 20 percent of the vote, just 2 percent less than Le Pen.
After the results came in, Mélenchon was the only defeated candidate who did not call upon his followers to back the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron against Le Pen in the second round. He instead consulted 250,000 of them online and found that two-thirds refused to support Macron. In the days leading up to round two, there was panic on the left.20 Even the former Communist Party organ L’Humanité printed op-eds calling on readers who had voted for Mélenchon to grudgingly back Macron.21 According to postelection polls, only half of Mélenchon’s voters did so; many simply stayed home, contributing to the highest abstention rate in decades (25 percent) and the largest number of blank or spoiled ballots (over four million, or 12 percent of all votes) ever recorded.22
Le Pen and Mélenchon together drew nearly 50 percent of the youth vote in the first round, splitting the 18–34 age bracket evenly. Unlike in Britain’s Brexit referendum, the young did not support the status quo; they voted for extremists who want to leave the EU.23
Those who believe millennials are immune to authoritarian ideas are mistaken. Using data from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have painted a worrying picture. As the French election demonstrated, belief in core tenets of liberal democracy is in decline, especially among those born after 1980. Their findings challenge the idea that after achieving a certain level of prosperity and political liberty, countries that have become democratic do not turn back.24
In America, 72 percent of respondents born before World War II deemed it absolutely essential to live in a democracy; only 30 percent of millennials agreed. The figures were similar in Holland. The number of Americans favoring a strong leader unrestrained by elections or parliaments has increased from 24 to 32 percent since 1995. More alarmingly, the number of Americans who believe that military rule would be good or very good has risen from 6 to 17 percent over the same period. The young and wealthy were most hostile to democratic norms, with fully 35 percent of young people with a high income regarding army rule as a good thing.25 Mainstream political science, confident in decades of received wisdom about democratic “consolidation” and stability, was ignoring a disturbing shift in public opinion.26
There could come a day when, even in wealthy Western nations, liberal democracy ceases to be the only game in town. And when that day comes, those who once embraced democracy could begin to entertain other options. Even Ronald Inglehart, the celebrated eighty-three-year-old political scientist who developed his theory of democratic consolidation more than four decades ago, has conceded that falling incomes, rising inequality, and the abject dysfunction of many governments—especially America’s—have led to declining support for democracy. If such trends continue, he wrote in response to Foa and Mounk, “then the long-run outlook for democracy is indeed bleak.”27
Part of voters’ disillusionment stems from the political establishment’s failure to confront very real tensions and failures of integration, either sweeping them u
nder the rug by pretending violent extremism and attacks on free speech were not problems or implementing policies that failed. These legitimate debates have been eclipsed by an obsessive focus on Muslims after 9/11 that paints them as somehow different from earlier immigrant groups, members of a uniquely violent and unassimilable religion. This image has played a crucial supporting role in legitimizing the rhetoric of anti-immigration parties and opened the door for a web-savvy army of right-wing propagandists who put forth arguments that are both offensive and easily digestible.
Christopher Caldwell’s provocative 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, stood out from the chorus of shrill and alarmist writers who warned that mass migration presented a fundamental threat to European culture and stability.28 His was a serious and carefully argued book.
The central question he posed was, “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” He held that the erosion of old Christian values and a strong sense of national pride in much of Western Europe weakened the cultural identity of countries to the point that they were no match for the all-encompassing identity offered by Islam.29
But Caldwell failed to pose a crucial and closely related question: can Europe be the same if it abandons its core political values? What he and others contending that Muslim immigrants threaten the West’s cultural fabric have neglected to ask is whether the threat to liberal democracy could originate from within, rather than from outside.
What if genuine refugees are sent home to face persecution and death? What will happen to the social fabric of democratic countries if foreigners are treated as second-class citizens and denied the same rights as the native-born? And what if, in reaction to the challenges of mass migration, liberal democracies abandon their constitutional principles and adopt exclusionary policies that erode their long-standing commitment to human rights?
Writers like Caldwell don’t seem to have considered that European nations’ harsh reactions to outsiders could reduce them to democracies on paper but not in practice—or that their leaders, facing extreme electoral pressure from angry citizens and right-wing parties, might sabotage their own painstakingly crafted democratic institutions.
Caldwell’s declaration that there is no political force in secularized Europe capable of matching the all-consuming identity offered by Islam seemed prescient when it was published, but it was premature.
As the events of the past two years have proved, there is in fact a powerful countervailing form of extremism that is alive and well in Europe: white nationalism. It was not strong enough to put Marine Le Pen in power, but it did garner over one-third of valid votes cast in France’s presidential runoff. It is a competing ideology that is in many ways a mirror image of radical Islamism; both share a nostalgic obsession with a purist form of identity: on the one side, a medieval Islamic State; on the other, a pure white nation unpolluted by immigrant blood. Both extremist visions feed off one another, and they have the power to tear Europe apart.
The nagging question today is which Europe will ultimately win. In the wake of Emmanuel Macron’s impressive victory in the French election, it is tempting to think that the plague of populist nationalism has been banished. But that would be naive.
Within minutes of Macron’s victory on May 7, 2017, the triumphalism began across the world. “Macron Defeats Radicalism”, proclaimed Spain’s El País. “France Stems Tide of Populist Revolution”, Britain’s Independent cheered. “White Nationalism Gets Thumped”, declared David Leonhardt in the New York Times the next morning.
The euphoria that greeted Macron’s victory is understandable but dangerous. Marine Le Pen’s FN won over 10.5 million votes, twice the number her father received in 2002. She ran a serious and competent campaign, unlike other far-right figures. As with Holland, where Geert Wilders’s weaker-than-expected showing in the March 2017 election was interpreted as a signal that populism’s march had been halted, there is no cause for celebration.
Wilders performed poorly because the few times he did campaign, he was surrounded by a phalanx of armed guards in small villages filled with supporters. Le Pen, by contrast, stumped all across the country and braved crowds throwing eggs at her in staunchly anti-FN Brittany. She even tried to upstage Macron in his hometown, Amiens, where he waded into a hostile crowd of striking Whirlpool workers and, rather than pandering, told them he wouldn’t make any “airy promises” to avert the closure of their factory.30 When Le Pen heard he was going to visit, she descended on the site with her entourage first, seeking to bolster her credentials with workers whom she knew would not be receptive to Macron’s free-market message. It was a bold move akin to Trump’s visit to an Indiana air conditioner factory a few weeks after the election, where he sought to show that he was already saving American jobs.
Even in Paris, where Marine Le Pen’s posters were routinely defaced with the word “SATAN,” there was no unanimity about how to fight her. Unlike in 2002, the front républicain that had battered Le Pen the elder did not materialize this time. Macron’s victory, with 66 percent of the vote, was a convincing one, but it was nowhere near Jacques Chirac’s 82 percent score—a testament to what Marine Le Pen has achieved. She has almost doubled her father’s share of the vote, having drawn in supporters from both the far left and centre right.31
After the FN’s loss, Le Pen gave a concession speech that sounded more like a campaign rally for the upcoming legislative elections. Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece, the more likable and telegenic face of the party, openly entertained the idea of overhauling the party on national television and perhaps further rebranding it to create a broader conservative movement. A few days later, Marion Maréchal announced she was leaving politics; few doubt she will be gone for long.32 If the FN finally abandons its name and the baggage that comes with it, younger leaders may be able to de-demonize the party in a way that Marine Le Pen could not.
Too many people on the European left scoff at nationalism, mistaking their own distaste for evidence that the phenomenon no longer exists or is somehow illegitimate. If 2016 and 2017 have proven anything, it is that this sort of visceral nationalism, or loyalty to one’s in group, still exists. It can be manipulated in ways that lead to chauvinistic violence, or it can manifest itself in innocuous displays of national pride, like waving the team’s flag at the World Cup. But it is not going away.
Pretending nationalism is passé may be popular among globe-trotting university students and tech entrepreneurs, but is not a political proposition likely to win national elections. As the Israeli academic Azar Gat argues, “Ethnic and national affinities have deep roots in the human psyche and have been among the most powerful forces in human history.” It is not merely a phase or some sort of “atavistic relic in a liberal, cosmopolitan, and universalist age.”33
The need for humans to belong to a group, as much as they need food, is an idea that goes back centuries.34 As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once argued, nationalism is a “pathological form of self-protective resistance” in the face of patronizing or condescending outsiders—“the inflamed desire of the insufficiently regarded to count for something.”35 Berlin wrote those words in 1972, but they could equally be applied to anti-EU Brexit voters and Le Pen’s supporters today.
Those who dismiss this sort of national sentiment as backward and immature do so at their own peril. People across the world, even the jet-setting members of the transnational elite, occasionally feel pangs of nostalgia for home cooking or a welcome ease when speaking their native tongue. This is not an irrational feeling; it is simply a fact of life. The problem for many on the globalist left is they falsely believed it could be purged.
As Berlin argued more than forty years ago, “There really are sincere and genuine liberals … who sometimes discount the very existence of certain facts” that might impede their goals. As if he were talking about the Brussels bureaucrats or self-assured American Democrats of 2016, he warned that some see the “existence of nations, of national feelings, as obstac
les and nuisances, … something which ought to be cleared away for the purposes of creating one great united human race.”36
What these globalists miss is that not everyone has the luxury of leaving. A well-educated multilingual Londoner with friends and family abroad could easily find work in Brussels or Frankfurt; for her, the EU represents great opportunity. For the resident of a small rural town, with no education beyond high school and no foreign language skills, the EU is a threat, especially when he is forced to compete with Poles and Romanians for construction jobs. Those who don’t have the education and skills to travel abroad often resent those who do. To compensate, they identify strongly with the place they come from and support politicians who promise to protect them from both genuine and imaginary threats. They do not have the luxury of voting with their feet, but their protest is felt at the polls.37
Paul Scheffer, the man who started the Dutch integration debate in earnest, says he entered the political trenches when he found himself asking, “Why is my tolerance falling apart?”
Scheffer warned in March 2016 that it was a mistake to dismiss Donald Trump or to argue that he was fundamentally different from European populists or less likely to win. He also pointed to the supporters who don’t fit easy stereotypes—pro-Trump Latinos, Surinamese Hindus who voted for Pim Fortuyn, or Dutch Moroccans who say Wilders is right, even if they won’t support him.
Holland, like many EU countries, has entered a postideological age where the cleavages that used to define parties and politics no longer exist. Years of coalition governments spanning the centre left and centre right emptied Dutch debate of genuine ideological clashes. This postideological moment is precisely what has made the ground fertile for populists and confused everyone else.
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