European getaway

Summer is here. It’s time for a break, especially from politics. Why waste time thinking about Hunter Biden’s convictions and President Joe Biden’s lack of them when we could, like Donald Trump, be enjoying our freedom while we can?

Let’s take a vacation in Europe. They have politics there, too, but a change is as good as a rest. European politics, like European food, differs from country to country, is frequently indigestible, and mostly resembles the American versions, only in smaller, historically accurate servings. Europe is full of history. This is why Europe isn’t modern. Then again, if “modern” means new, rather than mid-century, is the United States still modern?

The first European attempt to be modern went off the rails in 1933. The second attempt began under American supervision in 1945 and slathered a thin layer of ersatz Americana over the reconstruction. As everywhere, this American-ish facade covers enduring local peculiarities, not least resentment of American modernity. It also masks the traffic that’s going in the opposite direction. Americans will always be ahead of Europeans culturally because America was always meant to be Europe unleashed. But when it comes to political changes, Europe is often ahead.

The English Civil War begat the American Revolution. The French perfected the art of bureaucratic centralization two centuries before FDR and LBJ. The Germans devised “social democracy” as a trade-off between capitalism and socialism a century before Bill Clinton triangulated down the path of Third Way economics. The Finns were the first nation to have universal suffrage in 1906. Silvio Berlusconi moved into politics from construction and media in 1994, when Trump was busy marrying Marla Maples and floating his casinos.

Apply Green’s Theory of European Anticipation to the elections to the European Parliament that were held in early June, and we can predict big changes on this side of the pond. Europe’s middle ground, carved up between right- and left-leaning social democrats, remained stable, which in political terms means stagnant. Across the Continent, however, voters switched from left-wing and Green parties to the new parties of the Right.

The issues that caused this switch are the war in Ukraine, weak economies, the fraying of the social fabric due to high immigration, poor assimilation and rising crime, and a long-brewing resentment of a distant, patronizing, and self-serving political-media class. Sound familiar?

These New Right parties are frequently called “populist” or “insurgent,” and often “far right.” They have been populist in style ever since they appeared in the 1990s. They continue to thumb their noses at the establishment, even as they join it. Not all of them are still “insurgent.” Geert Wilders of the Netherlands has been a familiar figure for two decades, not least for the blond bouffant that anticipated those of Trump and Boris Johnson. Marine Le Pen in France, another familiar face, made it to the runoff in the 2022 presidential elections. The Danish People’s Party supported its government from 2001 to 2011 in a “confidence and supply” deal. The same arrangement currently props up a center-right government in Sweden.

Many of these parties began as extreme nationalists. Some started as neofascist in the aftermath of World War II. All of them have shed these associations as they have pursued votes and legitimacy. Their most popular policies are thoroughly mainstream: restoring sanity at the borders, applying law and order to society, preserving their national cultures and liberal values, protecting workers from the downside of the global economy. If these are “far-right” policies, then most Americans are “far-right” voters.

The New Right parties’ natural rivals, and natural partners, are the established center-right parties. In the U.S. and U.K., the two-party duopoly and first-past-the-post voting mean that the New Right fights for representation inside the established center-right party. The collapse of Britain’s Conservatives is a warning for the Republican Party. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is breathing down the Conservatives’ neck in opinion polls. Labour looks set to reduce the Conservatives to a few dozen members of Parliament in the elections on July 4. Farage intends a “reverse takeover” of the Conservatives.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

This is what happens when an established party misleads and insults its key constituencies. The same dynamic, and the same vote-splitting effect, can be seen in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential candidacy. As both the Republicans and the Democrats have misled and insulted their voters, it’s still unclear which party’s nominee would lose the most votes to RFK Jr.

The European elections forced French President Emmanuel Macron to call snap parliamentary elections. The battered socialists and the Greens have huddled into a “popular front” alliance. More surprisingly, Eric Ciotti, the leader of the center-right Les Republicains, offered to form an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Ciotti’s party promptly fired him, but the offer shows that the taboo against the Le Pens is losing its power. Apply Green’s Theory of European Anticipation to Trump, and you can see the implications for November.