Trump surges and Europe goes right. Will progressives learn the lesson?

The “new” right is succeeding so wildly in Europe at the moment that it’s hard to know where to start in cataloguing its triumphs.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has been in power for 14 years, reconstructing the country into what he calls an “illiberal democracy”. He’s been joined by Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) in Italy and the Finns (formerly True Finns) up north. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has completed his long march to have his Party for Freedom become the largest in the country’s highly proportional system. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats are the largest party and in the governing bloc. 

But the real victories are the ones that haven’t occurred yet, and which are keeping people awake at night.  In France, National Rally, the old National Front, has survived its defeat by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, and re-established itself as the principal alternative. And in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) is the second-largest party, and may be impossible to exclude from power in several coming state elections. Leaders from the latter recently met with neo-Nazi leaders in (where else?) a forest to discuss a plan for the mass deportation of millions of non-ethnic Germans, which has tarnished their nu-right image somewhat. 

Even the left’s successes are actually victories for the right. The Social Democrats success in Denmark is because it took over the politics of the Danish People’s Party — the first Western European alt-right party to take power — and now enforces immigration controls and de-ghettoisation moves, forbidding neighbourhood concentrations of migrant communities. Donald Tusk’s Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland recently won power with a similar reconstruction of its previous cosmopolitan cultural politics, to go up against the Law and Justice party, which runs at 35% support. 

What’s going on? You know what’s going on. Though there is a lot of talk about cost of living and other squeezes, the rise of the right is due to immigration and cultural transformation, with a side order of enforced cosmopolitan values. It’s all been brought to the boil by the pressures of inflation and economic stagnation, but they’re not the actual ingredients. The actual ingredients are that Europeans — and especially the native working classes — see their cultural worlds being worn away by the ever greater mobility of many millions of people. They don’t want it, they unseated centre-right parties that wouldn’t stop it, and now they’re deserting the social democratic parties they created to represent them a century ago.

The success of the new right is in part because it hasn’t asked its supporters to sign up to an old right manifesto with all the trimmings. Thus it’s pro-family and anti-gender/trans affirmative, but not anti-gay (that varies the further east you go), for example. Those and other policies allow a wider range of people to support it. In that sense, as I noted years ago, a basic progressive value system of sorts has won. How could it not? But in assuming much deeper support than that manifested, progressives have then lost.

Sure, such parties have had a lot of help from capital. Some have even been established by shadowy forces, super-rich members of the “right international” and networks such as the one Steve “this picture” Bannon has established across Europe and the world. But they wouldn’t have got anywhere if there hadn’t been a tremendous appetite for what they are offering.

The groups voting for these new parties — a section of the middle class deserting the centre-right and a section of the working class deserting the left parties — do want institutional economic disruption and the possibility of a revived economy, but mostly they’re voting for culture and way of life over the old left-right politics of the system. 

The centre-left and progressive leaderships still haven’t got this fully. Across the world, in places where such politics have not yet become a full crisis, they’re sticking to the old formula: progressives from the knowledge class set an agenda of liberal and cosmopolitan culture politics that only they support, impose a social market/left neoliberal economic politics by not organising against it, and expect that the old progressive alliance that held from the ’60s to the 2000s will hold. 

It won’t. It’s not. Some at the sharp end of it are learning that. Thus in Germany, Die Linke (The Left party) has split after years of decline owing largely to its adoption of cosmopolitan social policies as a new progressive elite joined it in recent years. Die Linke had evolved from the old East German-ruling Socialist Workers Party, and its focus for a long time was standing up for a semi-socialist economy.

It began to change as all its original members — who remembered and valued the rather drab everyday equality, collectivity and plentiful services of the GDR — died off, and a young left disenchanted with the Greens piled in. The party has been struggling along as a hybrid with declining support for years, while left thinkers such as Wolfgang Streeck have been advocating a turn to a communalist pro-borders party for years. After years in which the party’s vote fell from 11% to 4.9%, one-time leader Sahra Wagenknecht cracked and jumped out, forming a pro-tem list group with nine other deputies, and reaffirming left anti-high immigration policies. 

The crowning act of all this would be in the Anglosphere with the reelection of Donald Trump in the US, should it occur. This would be such a nightmare for progressives everywhere. Trump may well win with a minority vote again, but if he does it will be with strong phalanxes of the middle- and working-class, the rustbelt states lost afresh by the Democrats. In Australia? Well, the temperature remains low — low enough for the Coalition and News Corpse to try to start a culture war over Woolies’ commercial choices, lacking anything else — and may stay that way for a while. Curiously, the defeat of the Voice referendum may have assisted temperature control, serving as an opportunity for a public declarative assertion by European-Australians of a majority, relatively unified, culture. 

That’s all the more reason for progressive community and cultural leaders to use such time to think about how they will handle this global phenomenon — whether they will take a step back from their deep-rooted cosmopolitan value settings and assess the obvious situation: that strong progressive values, above all on immigration and the moral necessity of a cosmopolitan culture, will be held strongly only by about 25% or 30% of the population, and that may hold indefinitely. There is no point asking the (lumpen)cognitariat to do so. Your average knowledge-class person simply believes that the cosmopolitan, postmodern liberal values and preferences they were raised and educated in are the received truth, and they just happened to be born in the era that humanity stumbled upon them.

It’s up to thought leaders of these groups to start to force them to think about why they’re losing so badly — with potentially lethal consequences — and challenge them to start to come to some sort of middle ground. In Australia, where that sphere is self-contained and irrelevant — as the Voice vote showed — and rejoices in its irrelevance, there is almost no chance this will happen.