Prof Bug will be returning to the lengthy series, started last summer, on the innovative supremacy of the US economy, comparatively viewed. The 12th article will look at ideological influences in US politics and history that have shaped the unusually flexible and innovative economy of our country: in particular, the reasons for the absence of a left-wing socialist tradition. The 13th article, which will appear early next week, will then hop-skip across the political spectrum and explain why there has been no strong statist-conservatism in US politics similar to the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or, in West Europe, to Christian Democracy, Gaullism, the statist varieties in Scandinavia, and even the Tory wing of the British Conservative Party . . . even though Margaret Thatcher's dominant role in the party during the 1980s may have undermined its influence in Britain, and possibly once and for all.

In the meantime, the buggy prof wishes everyone a very happy Thanksgiving!

Why a second article? Well, it's not really a new article --- rather the last part of the original article, published on November 13, 2004, after the buggy prof decided to break it into two halves; taken together, the resulting pair form a mini-series on the topic of EU domestic developments and their implications for US-European relations, now and in the future. Why the decision to slice up the original article? Nothing surprising really --- just that it turned out to be pretty long; maybe unseemly so. Much wiser, then, to have the brief mini-series. Note that the two articles go hand-in-glove, adhering to the initial organization: five main parts, plus a cluster of sub-divisions.

The first article, you might recall, covered parts one and two. About to unfold here, the second article takes up the argument where it was left dangling in mid-air and follows its twists and turns to the very end through three more parts.



THE FIRST ARTICLE'S ARGUMENT RECAPITULATED

To make sense of the analysis that follows, you really should read the first article or at least run your eye over its main points --- including the comments sent to the buggy prof by Francis, a British citizen living and working in France (after a lengthy stint in Italy). When you're finished with that chore, you should have a much better working idea why --- thanks to political and intellectual vacuums that have emerged over the decades in the EU --- right-wing populist parties, some moderate as in Denmark and Holland, others far more extremist as in France, have quickly moved of late to fill that void. Except for Britain and Ireland, that's true almost everywhere in the EU these days.

That said, whether or not you've read the article, a good jump-off point here would be to set out briefly its main findings --- a task that now follows.

 

The Major Causal Forces Creating This Void In European Life, Exploited By The New Populist Right

Two overarching trends stand out here, one reinforcing the other.

• Political timidity and evasions that have marked the behavior of governing elites in the EU for two or three decades now in the face of mounting social and economic problems and growing ethnic strife.

It doesn't matter whether those elites in power have been on the left-of-center or the right-of center; all of them have been unwilling to confront honestly the surging challenges to their countries' economic and social well-being or the EU's declining role in global affairs. As these problems and challenges piled up, what the various EU countries have experienced --- Britain and Ireland the big exceptions --- is Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum governments, little else. Whether left-leaning or right-leaning, they have all proved unable or unwilling to tackle their countries' problems head-on or even, for that matter, to discuss them frankly with their publics. In the upshot, small wonder that the publics have grown more and more confused and worried, their increasingly pessimistic outlook marked by rising political alienation. These worries, pessimism, and confusion are easily documented. Last autumn's bi-yearly Eurobarometer surveys of opinion found that a good half of the EU's 380 million people doubted that the regional union was even a good thing on balance. Attitudes toward national governments were even more unfavorable. (For the statistics and the lengthy buggy take on them, see this article. )

Small wonder too that, amid the mounting failures of mainstream political elites, it's been mercurial right-wing populist leaders and their movements that have effectively, with growing intensity, appealed more and more to the worried EU peoples.

• It gets worse. What has aggravated these political and intellectual failures of the governing elites all over the EU except in Ireland and Britain has been the influence of the poll-parroting media almost everywhere around the EU, save for 3 or 4 outlets in London --- notably The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Telegraph, to which list, at times anyway, you could add Die Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Everywhere else, in dozens of different ways, the media has reinforced the politicos' timidity and evasions by strident, non-stop repetition of a ragbag of politically correct pieties and shibboleths . . . each and every one increasingly at odds with relentlessly changing realities: economic, political, and social. Part-and-parcel of an ideological world-view resistant to contrary information --- however blatantly such information may be at cross-purposes with orthodox pc-dicta --- those incessantly squawked dogmas are numerous and cover practically every topic under the sun, more or less like a surrogate religion of fundamentalist force.

What they don't do any longer, these haggard, platitudinous dogmas, is effectively conceal the failures and problems of the European welfare state, the illusory dreams of multicultural harmony, and the nature of EU regional government . . . technocratic, undemocratic, non-transparent, and full of regulation-mad bureaucrats.

Nor, it seems, have the increasingly strident efforts of the pc-elites and party activists at the grass-roots levels to blame West Europe's snowballing challenges and failures on outside influences --- whether George Bush's America, American power pure and simple, world Jewry, global capitalism, or what have you as the preferred scapegoat-culprit --- been entirely successful in reassuring the pessimistic, progressively worried EU publics that the old credos and shibboleths of European life, defended with politically correct fervor, are still the right guides for navigating through turbulent and violent times . . . the violence now rising with accelerating force.

Note the key phrase here: not entirely successful in reassuring most West Europeans. How else explain the growing disaffection among more and more disgruntled West Europeans, reflected among other things by the upsurge of right-wing populist movements in the EU . . . and in some countries of new radical left-wing movements as well? Not to mention the powerful thrust and appeal of radical Islam in the rapidly growing Muslim communities, marked more and more by Jihad sentiments, racism, and growing crime and violence committed by young Muslims everywhere in EU countries.

 

What Are The Most Egregious of These Fervently Held Articles-of-Faith?

Intoned and repeated over and again in the EU media, university classrooms, and political discourse without let-up, those politically correct credos that loom largest in West European life --- each being torn to tatters by sharp-edged realities day-in, day-out, on the national, regional, and global levels, to the confusion and dismay of the faithful --- seem, stripped-to-their-barebones, to be the following bevy of arbiter dicta:







(1) The EU countries will be able to easily assimilate rapidly growing Muslim communities at a time when the native European populations are shrinking steadily, many of them slated, on current trends, to die out in a century or so. All you need to do to achieve effective integration is try harder, which usually means spending more public money or introducing new regulations on ill-conceived schemes . . . none of which, in any case, have worked so far.

(2) For one and all, multicultural harmony is inevitable in European life --- and not only inevitable but eagerly desired by everyone, however much Islamist fundamentalism, alienation, violent crime, anti-Semitism, and support for Islamist terrorism are on the rise everywhere in the EU and now challenge practically every tenet of European democracy and secular life.

(3) The European welfare-state is a higher, more moral and sane way of organizing a national economy, so that any shortcomings are the fault of capitalist globalizing forces or American hegemony or casino-capitalism of the American sort --- or, as a topper, the failure of EU politicians to press harder for ever more regulations, welfare payments, and protection against rapacious Americans and industrializing Asian countries.

The latest Eurobarometer survey for 2004, published very recently, finds that general gloom prevails throughout the EU-15 about the economic situation: in particular prospects of growth, the job market, and family finances. Small wonder. Unemployment in the EU-15 runs twice as high as in the US; long-term unemployment, especially acute among young Europeans and minorities, is several times higher; and economic growth since the end of 2000 has scarcely advanced anywhere in the EU, aside from Britain and Ireland. One key result? Contrary to the widespread West European view that prevailed as late as the mid-1990s --- to wit, that the EU would outperform the US in the decades to come --- American GDP is now 55% higher than the EU average, roughly the gap that existed nearly a half century ago. For that matter, it's the same gap that prevailed more or less a good century ago at the start of WWI . . . compared to the richest European country, Great Britain.

If anything, that huge gap will likely increase in the years to come.

As a recent Swedish study by two economists showed, if any of the four biggest EU countries --- Britain, Germany, France, or Italy --- were suddenly to join the U.S. federation, it would be the fifth poorest state of the existing 50 states, ranking just ahead of Mississipi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Montana, and Oklahoma . . . all five of them far below average American per capita income. Sweden would be the 7th poorest state. The second richest EU country --- tiny Denmark --- would be the 10th poorest, and Ireland with the highest EU living standard would be ranked 14th among the poorest U.S. states.

For that matter, according to the same Swedish study, 40% of all of Swedish households "would rank among low-income households in the USA, and an even greater number in the poorer European countries would be classed as low income earnings by the American definition. In an affluent economy, in other words, it is not unlikely that those perceived as poor in an international perspective are relatively
well off."



(4) West European democracy is as sane, moral, and stable as the EU welfare-state, reflecting consensual, post-ideological approaches to European problems --- economic, social, cultural; what have you --- that trump the more raucous, money-laden democracy of the American sort. That's true on both the national and regional EU levels.

What follows? Well, it's said, the age-old specters in almost all of West European life before 1945 --- religiously inspired conflicts and violence; vicious ideological extremism on the left and right with roots in class-mistrust, class-fear, and class conflicts; national wars galore, one after another; waves of revolution and counter-revolution one after another; extermination and mass-murdering wars without parallel; rampant racism; rampant anti-Semitism; and all the other traumas that engulfed Europe before then except in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Britain aside from its terrible record in Ireland --- have been banished once and for all, replaced by thoughtful, middle-of-the road centrist parties fully dedicated to an expanding welfare state and increasingly humane forms of capitalism. Social-solidarity and social-sharing, so political rhetoric repeatedly emphasizes all over the EU, are the watchwords of the day, and a reality to boot.

On this fanciful view, extremist political parties, flagrant racism, spiraling ethnic strife, religious and racial violence, and class-tensions are all part of a distant, even ancient, past . . . never to return to haunt European life again.

(5) Violent crime is largely an American nightmare, whereas the saner, more solidaristic forms of the European Welfare State ensure that it won't ever reach American proportions, never mind --- silly, silly, silly --- ever exceed them. Yes, never mind that you are 6 times more likely to be mugged on the streets of London today than in New York's; or that it's a scary experience to enter any European subway system at night; or that in large numbers Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Spaniards, and others are afraid to go out at night in their cities.

UN-sponsored surveys of crime-victims across industrial countries, to be more concrete, find that the US ranks in the bottom third, far behind Britain and noticeably behind the other large EU countries in violent crime. See the previous buggy article in this mini-series for the stats and links. In the latest Eurobarometer survey for 2004, crime ranked as the second biggest problem in EU opinion, behind unemployment but a touch ahead of the overall economic situation within each country. By contrast, the UN surveys find that Americans are the least concerned of all the peoples in the industrial countries about going out into public spaces, day or night; siimilarly, Americans have more confidence in their country's police than Europeans or Japanese have in theirs.

(6) Regional development in the EU is not just highly desirable, but has the widespread support of the average West European . . . so that further and further integration, financial, economic, and social, can and will be easily supplemented with ever more effective military cooperation and coordinated diplomacy. The deeper the integration, the more West European citizens will appreciate what is being done for them, especially in the tête-à-têtes among governmental ministers and technocrats the EU regional level.

Never mind the distant technocratic style of the EU's haughty Commission in Brussels and the thousands of bureaucrats --- all of them, it seems, regulation-mad, writing endless tomes that seek to regulate ordinary daily life down to the sub-atomic level (like a 125 page document that specifies the designs of buses, with another similar document promised as a follow-up) --- and the secrecy that surrounds policymaking in the Council of Ministers, and the pervasive corruption that prevailed among the 20 Commissions in the late 1990s that forced all of them to resign, and the lack of any evidence that the Commission and its bureaucrats are any more transparent or accountable financially or otherwise since then. On the latter, see this buggy link.

(7) The EU is a mighty regional force in global affairs, diplomatic and otherwise, and will continue to surge in influence world-wide. The worse thing would be to shift scarce governmental finances away from welfare and social programs into higher levels of defense spending . . . not simply because that would hurt core programs essential to morally superior European economic life, full of solidarity and good-will among all citizens, but because it would detract from the real sources of potent European influence around the world: its moral stature and estimable way-of-life.

(8) The United Nations is mankind's best hope, which should replace the role of traditional national security and would were it not for the United States and its lap-dog followers like Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair . . . never mind that, in 2003 before the war to topple Saddam Hussein in March, Saddamite Iraq and terrorist-and-fundamentalist Iran were slated to head the UN disarmament commission, terrorist-and-brutal Libya headed the UN Human Rights Commission, and brutal-and-terrorist Syria headed the Security Council.

And that in late November 2004 the UN General Assembly refused to condemn the mass-murdering atrocities, hundreds of thousands dead, committed by the Sudanese government and its militia allies (no surprise really . . . not when most of the member-states of the UN are themselves major human-rights violators or vicious predators). And that a US Senate Intelligence Committee, given extensive Iraqi documents just recently, concluded that $21 billion of the oil-for-food UN's program was skimmed off by Saddam, with large chunks used to bribe certain governments --- France, Russia, and China among others, along with private companies that include some American ones in the oil business --- and, apparently, UN officials galore . . . including Kofi Anan's own son, a big player on the financial side of the huge scam, the biggest in world history. And that the UN human rights interventions in the 1990s were almost all disastrous, whether in Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East.

And that, as a capper --- this very week --- the UN's higher civil servant staff all signed a resolution that only stopped short of condemning Kofi Anan's leadership and the incompetence and lack of transparency that prevail in the UN bureaucracies themselves, as well as the bevy of scandals that are erupting all around the UN General Secretary and his associates. "The senior management no longer displays the level of integrity expected of all employees or the organization," said a draft of the resolution.



(9) And, next . . .

. . . Well, the list of these politically correct canons, clung to and repeated with the fervor of a catechism voiced by novice eager-beaver priests, runs on. And on. Dealing with most of the ones just listed was what the first article in this series did. It tried to show, specifically, how a far-flung complex of policies and behavior inspired by these politically correct articles-of-faith have backfired, creating one tangled mess after another in West European affairs: a mishmash of evasions, failures, and spiraling conflicts . . . and all at odds with hard, fast-moving realities.

All of which brings us to our . . .

 

MAIN TASK HERE

As it happens, this task is no less important than the one grappled with in the first article, and maybe more so: the need, tersely said, to gather together our various findings about the dominant trends in EU life pinned down earlier --- whether political, economic, or social; not to forget the intellectual and cultural thrusts in West European life --- and put them all in a wider international perspective. For Americans and Europeans, international here means something fairly restrictive: teasing out the trends' multiple implications for US-EU relations, now and in the near future.

 

Our Main Conclusion of the Mini-Series Foreshadowed

Simply said, those multiple implications do not augur happily for Trans-Atlantic relations, just the reverse --- not that NATO will disappear as an alliance in the next decade or so.

That's unlikely. Rather, it will probably grow less and less important in the foreign policies of the US, as West Europe's numerous domestic challenges and problems get more and more entangled in a thicket of expanding grievances and resentments about the US and as West Europeans simultaneously direct more of their own disillusion and fears toward their own mainstream governing elites and other home-grown culprits, real or imagined . . . the latter of the scapegoating sort. Then, too, on a strictly global level as we'll see in a few moments, American interests will very likely continue to shift away from Europe and toward far more important countries in the Middle East and Asia, and again strictly for reasons of national security.

First, the domestic trends. Four dominant ones are at work here in US-European relations, and they are overwhelmingly European in nature, not American:

Francis, a Briton living and working in France (after a long stay doing the same in Italy), has been a frequent contributor to the buggy site with his comments on European life and attitudes, not least toward the USA in the Bush era. Those comments are invariably valuable and stimulating --- doubly so because they draw on his own personal experiences and observations, made all the sharper by his long efforts as a writer, both of fiction and non-fiction. Once again, he has left prof bug and the visitor here in his debt. Note that his comments have been slightly edited to make them more understandable to American readers.

From Francis, A British Citizen Living in France:

I'm glad to see you back writing Prof Bug. I'm not going to criticize your evaluation of the US because I agree with it and in any case you live there and I don't. However I disagree somewhat with your summary of European trends.

First a nitpicking correction: you mispelled the name of the the right-wing Belgian party; it's called the Vlaams Blok.

Second and more important, as you yourself note, the far right has been gaining support all over the EU, not just in Belgium, and the major cause is easy to isolate: the ongoing failure everywhere to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Up to now, mainstream governing elites of either the left or right have bungled this pivotal challenge. Either they've sidestepped it entirely or --- in some countries --- mishandled it when they did try something, however obliquely. Belgium is a case in point. The VB received 1 million votes in the last general elections there out of a population of 10 million (not the electorate, the population), and its level of support continues to grow despite universal condemnation by everyone respectable in politics, the media, universities, or the churches. The fact that the Belgium Supreme Court has just banned the party shows both a worrying lack of judgment and an extremely worrying lack of freedom of expression.

Then there's Holland, just across the border to the north. The reaction of the Dutch to the murder of Theo Van Gogh last week is doubly revealing here: more and more Dutchmen are unhappy with the country's political status quo, and the electoral success of Pim Fortuyn, before he was murdered two years ago, further reinforces this point. His right-wing populist party continues to be represented in the Dutch parliament, even though it doesn't have any members in the center-right coalition government.

In short, there's a major problem here, and in Holland and Belgium and all over the EU, the reaction of governing elites has generally been denial or misdirection.

All this, I believe, helps explains their anti-Americanism. By blaming Mid-East conflicts on those meddling Yankee cowboys in control allegedly of the powerful USA, the governing elites and their media and intellectual acolytes show their ignorance even as they hope, in demagogic fashion, to convince their populations to look elsewhere for their own home-grown problems --- especially growing racial frictions between Muslim communities and native Europeans. In the short run, perhaps, this diversionary tactic might work; it even helped Gerhard Schroeder to be re-elected in Germany back in 2002, when he won almost entirely because of his anti-American rhetoric. In the long run, though, the tactic will backfire. It only delays the need everywhere to tackle resolutely the threats posed by rapidly growing Muslim communities that are themselves increasingly alienated and at loggerheads with European secular life. In my view, the efforts to squelch or stigmatize the right-wing populists --- even responsible ones like Pim Fortuyn or at least some of the Vlaams Blok leaders --- are motivated in part by the fears of the governing elites, whether on the left or right, that their blatant failures to deal effectively with the challenge of fundamentalist Islam and the growing numbers of Muslim immigrants in West Europe will be exposed for what they are: bankruptcy in government.

There's more too. A double-standard is applied, it seems, to right-wing populist rhetoric that is deemed hateful or racist, whereas firebrand statements made by Islamic extremists are usually not prosecuted at all. Their hatred, it's said, reflects the shortcomings of European life, and the alleged grievances behind it need to be addressed. Call it hypocrisy or tunnel vision or what you want. Along with the anti-American diversionary tactics, the use of double standards here will likely have only one consequence: it will create more and more voters for right-wing populist parties and movements.

 

THE BUGGY REPLY:

PART ONE
RIGHT-WING POPULISM IN THE EU

Francis:

Many thanks for your valuable comments, all of which call for some replies . . . some in agreement with your analysis, others at odds with them.

Belgium and the Vlaams Blok

As you note, I managed to misspell Vlaams Blok, the Belgian right-wing populist party. A good lesson here. It would only have taken a few seconds to check the spelling in Google, something I just did.

One article that it brought up revealed that the VB--- which enjoys active support from Le Pen's National Front party in France (where it draws the support of about 20% of the electorate) --- is now attracting about 1/4 of the vote in the Dutch speaking areas of Belgium, the Flemish region that has about 6 million of the country's total 10.3 million people. That's in national elections. In local elections, the party does even better. In Antwerp, Belgium's largest port city and overwhelmingly Flemish, it has gathered about 33% of the vote in local elections. What does the party stand for? Essentially two things: strict limits on foreign immigration, with a racist message --- very similar to Le Pen's National Front's position in France really --- and independence for the Flemish, the Dutch-speaking people of Belgium's federal system.

The former message has caused legal troubles for Vlaams Blok. Just this week, as you note, it was found to be racist by the Belgium Supreme Court --- a ruling that will end any state financing that the other parties represented in the national parliament continue to enjoy. That said, the party hasn't been banned as you implied. It will just have to find financial support elsewhere. And you're no doubt right: it will likely continue to enjoy more and more support. That's also true of its equivalents elsewhere in the EU --- whether more moderate or more extreme --- as long as mainstream politicians of either the left or the right fail to tackle the major social and economic problems that all the West European populations have to confront: among them declining native populations, a rapidly growing numbers of retirees who live on state-pensions, and very slow or stagnant economic growth . . . not to forget growing unemployment of a structural short, especially high among young adults, and surges of violent crime all over the EU. In the minds of more and more West Europeans, many of these problems are entangled with the rapid increase in size of the Muslim communities, themselves increasingly fundamentalist in nature and in conflict more and more with European secular life.

Holland, probably the most advanced post-modernist country in the EU in matters of sexual and other freedoms --- a small country of 15 million who rightly took pride in their long-standing traditions of tolerance and respect for civil liberties --- is a particularly useful weather-vane of shifting sentiments. Not only have the Dutch awakened in the last two years to find that they're caught up in a horrific vortex of growing ethnic and racial violence, what with the killing of Pim Fortuyn two years ago and the recent jihad-inspired racist murder of Van Gogh, the film-maker, last week, but even more the multicultural illusions and dogmas, pc-style that were inviolate before 2002, have now been shattered . . . probably for good, with a big revulsion among the Dutch native population towards their Arab Muslim minority (Muslims accounting for about 9% of the 16 million number of people in that country).

We'll return to the Dutch case later on in this article. In the meantime, you'll find the reportage in the New York Times November 14th, 2004, issue especially revealing here. Doubly so, come to that, because the American reporter, Bruce Bawer, had lived in Holland in the late 1990s, and was struck by the complacency and reluctance of his Dutch friends, acquaintances, and others he interviewed even to discuss the question of Dutch-Arab Muslim relations. All this has now abruptly changed. Click here for the Times article.

Back To Right-Wing Populism in the EU, Extremist or Moderate

As the last line of argument left hanging fire before the sidebar comments indicated, I agree in large part with your analysis of why these right-wing movements have been snowballing in their growing support around the EU; and for that matter, several earlier buggy articles have set out the reasons why and the evidence for their big electoral breakthroughs of the last few years. (Start with these two links, though there are plenty more: 1) and 2) ) Whether in Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, France, Austria, or Italy --- for that matter, in the eastern sectors of Germany --- those breakthroughs clearly reflect the failure of left-center and right-center Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum governments to respond effectively to the problems listed a moment ago.

Some of these populist right-wing movements --- in Denmark, Holland, and Norway --- have proved relatively moderate when they've shared power.

The buggy prof --- taking another rest over the last month for physical reasons (sore hands and wrists) --- now finds that he can sit at a p.c. once more and bang out some observations without much pain, thank heavens. The following exchange, initiated by a U.S. citizen who has UK citizenship as well and has been living and working in Britain for decades, deals with the outcome of the recent US presidential election and the reactions in West Europe to Bush's victory.

From Alan, an American Living in Britain:

Hello Michael:

I thought I would just share a few brief thoughts on the re-election of Bush, and the reaction in this country and on the Continent.

I'm surprised how many people seem to think the outcome has signaled the victory of Mordor, the ultra bad-guy in Lord of the Rings --- the ruler of the dark world. Many of the people I know seem hysterical in their Bushophobia.

One expects this here in West Europe, but all in all, from what I can tell, we Brits seem to accept the re-election with more equanimity than many people I've heard from and read about in the States or on the Continent. I say this, as you know, as no great fan myself of Bush; but I found Kerry, his opponent, about as substantial as candy-floss. What's more, I'm not sure what Kerry as a president would do that would be so different, substantively, than Bush himself. Unfortunately, as I didn't receive an absentee ballot, I couldn't vote. Had it come, I'm not sure who I would have voted for.

In foreign policy matters, I think Bush's position on Iraq is still sound for strategic reasons, even if the neo-con hopes for democracy in the Middle East strike me as naive. Sadly, his Administration's tactics in Iraq since the war itself ended in April 2003 have been full of blunders, a point you yourself made in one of your recent buggy articles. As for his views on stem cell research, they strike as medieval. All in all, Bush strikes me as a fully convinced politico. It's a character trait that can lead to rigidities and be scary, but I doubt that Armageddon is around the corner.

 

On a different topic, what do you think will happen with the Palestinians after Arafat, who will soon be with his ancestors? For my part, I doubt whether the Palestinians will make the changes in leadership changes needed to reach a lasting compromise with Israel. There are too many competing and armed factions in their society to enable this, or am I excessively pessimistic:

 

The Buggy Reply

Alan:

Many thanks for your message, which has some relevant observations and raises a few queries that merit a few responses.

First, Bush's Election and EU Reactions

With a politically correct media flourishing all over the media in West Europe, even in Britain except for The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Telegraph, it doesn't surprise me to learn how Europeans and others abroad have reacted to the outcome of our election here. In the end, for what it's worth, prof bug --- after prayer of great length and excessive virulence (as Mencken once put it in the 1920 US presidential election when he voted for the numskull Harding) --- crossed his ballot for the consummate flip-flopper, Senator Kerry . . . reassured, despite his record of chronic anti-militarism that included opposition to the Persian Gulf War in 1991, by the kinds of foreign policy advisers around him. By contrast, the Bush record in Iraq since the war's end in the spring of 2003 also seemed so riddled with unnecessary blunders and setbacks that the president deserved to be punished at the polls --- or so it seemed to me despite supporting the decision to topple the brutal, mass-murdering Saddamite regime.

Even so, I was hardly surprised by Kerry's defeat, generally predicted with accuracy by all the public opinion surveys except the one run by Zogby--- a pollster whose statistical methodologies (explained at length in a recent New Yorker article) seem wacko. Kerry didn't inspire confidence among the majority of voters. No surprise really, a matter I'll return to in a few moments.

 

As for your reference to Mordor, that's not much of an exaggeration to judge by what I've seen in the press or watching French news each night.

Essentially, to put the nutbin reactions in West Europe to the election's outcome in perspective, the hierarchy of evil in European p.c. circles seems to be headed by a quarter of heavies: Mordor in fourth place, topped by Beelzebub, then by Hitler, and at the top, the acme of mofo evildoers, by the Texan Toxin himself. Imagine the cowboy's gall. He has dared to reject all the pieties and the rest of the taken-for-granted litany of left-wing and Gaullist European shibboleths and illusions that have brought economic growth to a near standstill in all of West Europe save for Britain, Ireland, and a couple of tiny Scandinavian countries, even as, at the same time, their multicultural utopian dreams have come crashing down around them in growing social conflicts, violent crime, Islamist radicalism, anti-Islamic racism, and fascist-like right-wing backlashes that include more and more anti-Semitism as well. Witness, alas, the nosedive of civility and the surge of hostility, violence, and ethnic and religious conflict in the Netherlands --- a country traditionally of impressive civic discipline and an admirable respect for civil liberties.

Is the plunge in Dutch civility and social harmony unique to that country?

Hardly. What's happening in that small affluent country of 15 million people is, I fear, an augury of what's in store for virtually every country in West Europe. Holland, after all, doesn't have the history of Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy, or France, all countries with a long history of extremist ideologies, political violence, dictatorial rule, militarism, and racisms of various sort . . . for all the impressive changes that have occurred in all of them since 1945.

Take Spain. There, according to recent reports, the appeasement of Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist terrorists after the bombings in Madrid last spring have done nothing to assuage the desires of Islamist crazies to continue building bombs and trying to set them off. Ever since, it seems, one terrorist network after another plotting new bombings has been uncovered . . . often weekly. Bin Laden himself has demanded that Spain cede its southern regions (Andalusia) back to Muslim rule before he is satisfied that these conquistador-types have learned how to respect his version of Islam. Meanwhile, in France, Le Pen's extremist movement not only goes on flourishing politically, it has managed to influence French public opinion in noticeable ways, dragging it rightward to the point that it overlaps with National Front positions. Not for nothing did Le Monde note last year, after some recent public opinion surveys, that a majority of Frenchmen now shared the National Front's extremist positions on a host of social issues relating to minorities, civil liberties, dangers, and immigration.

 

Back in the US

The Democrats, alas --- my party of preference for decades --- are increasingly out of touch with the majority of US citizens: their aspirations, hopes, fears, and longings. A party of minorities, it is now ending up a minority party on the national scene. Worse, most of the minorities are themselves moving toward the Republicans.

Nearly a majority of Latinos voted for Bush (45%), the evangelical conversion rate especially high among them; and about 25-30% of Jews followed suit. Women too --- traditionally, since the 1960s, a Democratic stronghold --- moved more into the Republican camp and more or less divided their vote equally. All these electoral developments are bad portents for the future of the Democratic Party unless its leaders find a way to move closer to the political center again --- itself now shifted toward the right in reaction to 40 years of moral and social changes that a large number of average Americans find worrying, a source of moral rot or threat. Are there any groups still strongly for Democrats? Yes, African-Americans --- about 11% of the population (though Bush did draw more black votes this time than in 2000). And one other, tinier still: Hollywood and other media celebrities and their co-workers. Most of them, as a recent buggy article showed, are founts of left-wing clichés and pieties, and they seem to influence one another in a self-made cocoon, convinced that the average American is a boob like Bush himself.