The election of Donald Trump has its dark trans-Atlantic parallel in the rise of right-wing movements across Europe; we are facing a disturbing international phenomenon, and figuring out its roots as well as its national variations will be key to stopping and reversing this trend towards authoritarian, racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic politics. To this point, the New York Times has a complementary pair of stories this week about the growing electoral prospects of the far right in both France and Germany via the growth of the National Front and Alternative for Germany. Both offer good on-the-ground reporting as well as larger insights about what is and might be going on.
Populisms of both the right-wing and left-wing varieties are on the rise around the Western world: in the United States, not just Trump but Bernie Sanders succeeded beyond the wildest mainstream imaginings this past election cycle. And in Europe, left-wing movements have prominently arisen in Spain and Greece. Whether on the right or left, these trends have generally been observed to be a response to economic inequality and stagnation, a sense of powerlessness among voting populations, and a feeling that an economic elite has gained too much power.
In some ways, an optimist might look at a party like Marine Le Pen’s National Front, and see that this is a movement with real differences from what we’re used to thinking of as conservatism in the United States. There’s much more talk of economic equality, more consideration of things like protecting benefits that seem to partake more of socialism than any free market ideology.
But as is described in studies and books (such as in John Judis’ recent The Populist Explosion), right-wing populism often identifies an “other” beyond monied interests as part of the problem, such as immigrants who are taking away jobs, to explain the economic difficulties their country faces. And indeed, the right-wing populist situation in both Germany and France involves the increased mainstreaming of a chilling and hateful scapegoating of vulnerable minorities; the photo of National Front members with a poster showing France subdued under the shadow of minarets is particularly nauseating and emblematic of the nastiness involved. (The notion that France is under some sort of imminent threat of occupation by marauding Muslims becomes even more fraught when you stop to consider the various French interventions in the Muslim world over the past several years, including in Mali, Libya, Iraq, and Syria.)
A right-wing populism that claims to oppose inequality, economic stagnation, and the power of elites, but that riles up its voters by scapegoating immigrants and religious minorities as being equally responsible for their discontent, carries the threat of establishing a nasty, illiberal status quo that ends up solving no real economic problems, and enabling greater persecution of vulnerable populations as politicians double down on this one “threat” they can more easily exert some control over — as opposed to, say, truly challenging entrenched undemocratic power.
The central complication is that, just as in the U.S., the populist right nonetheless has identified, and promises a response to, a definite economic malaise, where parties in the center and the left are perceived to have failed. On the one hand, there is a fundamentally democratic element in saying that ordinary citizens should have more control over their economic destiny; after all, drawing a line between where democracy ends and economics begins has in some ways been the central conundrum of our age, and is at the root of many of our greatest problems. But as we see in the United States, this democratic notion has been dangerously tied an authoritarian solution, in which Donald Trump would act on behalf of the people to make things right, even if it means asserting maximal powers and subverting other institutions of government, such as the courts. (In contrast, witness Bernie Sanders’ many assertions about ordinary people needing to get involved with politics, and his followers' moves to take over the Democratic Party from the bottom up. For Donald Trump, there is only politics from the top down.)
Both articles in the Times raise a central irony — the way that the right in France and Germany has subverted something that makes those countries admirable — taking in millions of refugees and other immigrants from outside the E.U. — by using this humanitarianism to drive fears of a racial and religious invasion by outsiders. (And of course, it’s not just humanitarianism that has led France and Germany to welcome immigrants — these newcomers have also created many benefits for the economy, as they have also done in the United States.) The idea that a relatively small group of immigrants could somehow cripple and undermine German and French society also raises the question of how little faith the Germans and the French have in their own cultures and societies: to an outsider, it seems far more likely that the dominant culture would absorb the newcomers, rather than the other way around. And if there are issues with immigrants not integrating into their new societies, surely there are productive remedies for dealing with this; it’s obvious that demonizing newcomers is the opposite of welcoming them.
And yet, this fundamental insecurity about the strength of their societies exists. On the one hand, all this scapegoating of dark-skinned immigrants who take people’s jobs seems like displaced aggression against the intra-European immigration that has been enabled under the European Union, in which citizens of one EU member can cross borders without fuss and work in another country. The fears of cultural assault associated with these non-European immigrants likewise seems to be tied to fears of losing national identity on account of the European Union.
There is also the intriguing possibility raised that Germany is particularly, and ironically, susceptible to nationalistic, xenophobic appeals because of its post-WWII policy to downplay nationalism; one interviewee suggests that this lack of identity has left people feeling an “inner emptiness.” Germany is one of the most extreme examples possible regarding issues of nationalism and identity, and the fact that even conscious attempts to move beyond nationalism are facing such challenges calls for close consideration.
But here I will use the extreme to pivot to what is, at least for me, one of the most important questions to answer in this time of political peril: How can a truly democratic politics energize people without resorting to nationalistic appeals that seem to so easily slide into xenophobia, racism, and religious discrimination? Another way of putting this: How does the left compete with a right-wing vision that’s so very comfortable with demonizing not just immigrants, but even other citizens, to rile up its supporters? Because what we are seeing in Europe right now appalls and frightens me — I have trouble comprehending that a continent that experienced the Holocaust would, within living memory of that horror, see the rise of politicians who thrive on religious hatred and demagoguery, deploying not just anti-Muslim slander, but anti-Semitism as well. It can’t just be about stopping these movements; it has to be about how we create a politics, and a society, that makes these movements unthinkable and taboo.