by Raheem Kassam
Establishment Democrats intent on unseating President Trump in next year’s election won’t find much solace in the results of the European elections.
The results of last week’s elections underscored voters’ unabated rejection of establishment politicians and rising support for the nationalist right, of which America’s MAGA movement is a central component.
The forces of the old liberal, globalist order that Donald Trump defeated in the U.S. in 2016 are now in retreat all across the old continent. Nigel Farage, the Brexit visionary and early Trump endorser, now leads the largest single party – The Brexit Party – in Brussels. Matteo Salvini, whose Lega Party’s unrelenting stand against illegal immigration electrified Italian politics, took a decisive win.
For decades America’s coastal liberal elites have thumbed their noses at their “deplorable” countrymen who voted for Donald Trump and looked across the Atlantic for an example of a more “enlightened” citizenry. They seemed to carry the view that if only these middle America Trump supporters were more like Europeans, leftists could have things their way.
If last week’s European elections are any indication, they may need to re-assess that assumption. Despite their thinking, the Democrats don’t represent a cosmopolitan consensus temporarily frustrated by a recalcitrant hinterland. Rather, they’re marooned on an island of failing globalist ideology, battered on all sides by the waves of a populist awakening.
When you understand this new reality that’s setting in for the American left, their increasing hysteria, extremism, and detachment from reality makes more sense. For all of their bluster about President Trump’s brash and irreverent style, it is the break with that order and its dogma on issues such as immigration, trade, and social policy that makes up the core of the Democrats’ opposition to Trump.
The Democratic establishment in this country, just like the Republican establishment before it, has been crippled by the rise of Trumpism because it is unable to comprehend the popularity of nationalism. That’s why liberals have turned to nonsensical conspiracy theories about Russia, racial fear-mongering, and violent public tantrums in place of substantive policy arguments.
The liberal establishment in Europe has been trying to stave off its own defeat with those same unhinged coping mechanisms.
Pro-European Union liberals, leftists, and their allies in the European media, like Representative Adam Schiff and his media acolytes here in the States, have made an inordinate effort to paint their nationalist opponents as Russian stooges. They’ve even arranged tabloid-worthy entrapment schemes to “prove” it.
They also ceaselessly accuse the nationalist parties of racism, dismissing broad popular opposition to mass illegal migration as “xenophobia” stirred up by would-be fascists.
As these tactics have come up short, leftists have simply resorted to political violence, throwing milkshakes on nationalist politicians they’re afraid to debate in a civilized manner. Predictably, what started with milkshakes quickly turned to bricks.
This will all seem familiar to American voters. American leftists have been harassing Republican politicians and attacking President Trump’s supporters for years now, often with the express approval of Democratic officials and the media. Similarly, the Democrats have spent almost three years caught up in hysteria over the now-debunked Russia collusion hoax. Their poll-leading hope to unseat President Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden, literally launched his campaign with a bald-faced lie about the racism of President Trump.
American liberals ought to take a lesson from their European co-ideologues: these childish tactics don’t work. Anti-Brexit political parties in the United Kingdom and establishment voices throughout the EU suffered a historic defeat. Unless they’re prepared to dramatically change course, the Democratic Party is headed towards the same fate in the 2020 elections.
Europeans voted against centralized EU power and mass illegal immigration last week because they want their governments to represent their interests, not because they’re Russian assets, evil racists, or ignorant rubes, as liberals errantly assume.
Americans didn’t elect Donald Trump for such nefarious reasons, either. They elected him as part of a greater worldwide deluge of discontent over the failure of the neoliberal consensus with which Democrats are aligned. The European Parliament elections make it clear that this phenomenon isn’t letting up — in fact, it’s gaining strength from even broader coalitions of supporters across the globe.
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Raheem Kassam is the Global Editor in Chief of Human Events.
Photo “Raheem Kassam” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Excellent commentary. This really hits the issue on the head. Unfortunately the Left will stop at nothing (look at the yet to be completely exposed Russia collusion hoax) to transform America into their socialist ecotopia. I am afraid terrible acts and violence await this Nation before we ever come back to some sense of civil unity.