New York Times (Opinion):
By Ross Douthat
August 10, 2015
I
tried to avoid the coals-to-Newcastle phenomenon that is Trump coverage
this weekend by writing my Sunday column on immigration politics in
Europe instead, with a particular
focus on how the widening population differential on either side of the
Mediterranean, already roiling European politics, is likely to create a
kind of sweeping “Eurafrican” interaction over the next fifty years,
with truly unknowable results. It’s a big topic,
a lot bigger even than the yugeness of Trump … but there are, yes,
links between the two phenomena, which my old friend Reihan Salam teased
out a bit for Slate last week:
…
Trump is very far from a Republican regular. He represents an entirely
different phenomenon, one that bears little resemblance to
garden-variety American conservatism.
Go
to almost any European democracy and you will find that the parties of
the center-right and center-left that have dominated the political scene
since the Second World
War are losing ground to new political movements. What these movements
have in common is that they manage to blend populism and nationalism
into a potent anti-establishment brew. One of the first political
figures to perfect this brand of politics was the
very Trumpian Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon who rose to
power as part of a coalition of right-of-center parties in the
mid-1990s, and who has been in and out of power ever since, dodging
corruption charges and worse all the while. More recently,
the miserable state of Europe’s economies has fueled the rise of dozens
of other parties. Britain’s Labour Party has been devastated by the
rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party, but also by UKIP, a
movement of the right that has been growing
at Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by
largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the
welfare state. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, has a penchant for bombast
that endears him his working-class base, which might
sound familiar to you.
Read
the rest, with which I concur but to which I would add one important
further point: To the extent that the seeds for a populist-nationalist
movement exist in the
United States, and to the extent that Trump is watering them with his
own personal elixir, I think our own anxieties differ somewhat from the
essential fears of Europe, in that in the U.S. there’s slightly less
anxiety about the loss of national identity and
a little more anxiety about the loss of greatness and exceptionalism
and economic supremacy and (though most people wouldn’t phrase it this
way) empire.
Which
is not to say that the immigration issue isn’t inextricably linked to
populism generally — even to Bernie Sander’s sort, a little bit — and to
Trump’s particular
(if complicated) appeal. (Don’t hurt me, Mickey!) But if you look at
his rhetorical posture overall, including the way he led things off at
last week’s debate, the Trump Narrative (TM) is less about threats to
American national identity per se, in the style
of Marine Le Pen or Farage with La Belle France or Little England, than
it is about the collapse of American competence, effectiveness, and
success. Thus Trump is less likely to say that we’re getting overrun by
the Mexicans than he is to say that we’re getting
beaten by the Mexicans (and their government), in the same way that (he
argues) we’re getting beaten by everybody: ISIS, the Chinese, the
Iranians, you name it. If you want to cast him as just a nativist, his
slogan “Make America Great Again,” can be read
as a dog-whistle to some whiter and more Anglo-Saxon past, but I think
it makes more sense to just take it literally – as a complaint about
everything from the failed Iraq adventure (another frequent Trumpian
theme) to the general stagnation of of our economy
and the sclerosis of our government, and an implicit plaint for the
days (which most of his supporters remember) when America won the Cold
War and by-God Put a Man on the Moon. (And even built a single-payer
health care system for old people … but that, folks,
was “a different age.”)
The
theme of ebbing greatness isn’t absent in European populist politics,
of course, particularly in France. But it’s not always the major theme,
because European societies
have had to come to terms with their lost power, their vanished
empires, across years and generations. Whereas the challenges posed to
Europe’s nations by immigration and assimilation are fresher (especially
on a continent where peace was finally gained after
World War II in part by a bloody rationalization of national borders
along ethnic lines) and potentially sharper (because of the role of
Islam and Islamist terrorism), and more likely (given population trends)
to grow apace with every passing year.
Again,
it’s not that the immigration issue doesn’t matter in America; as a
moderate-restrictionist, comprehensive-reform skeptic obviously I think
it does. But America
has experience with assimilation that Europe lacks, we have the
advantage of a federal system that partially limits balkanized responses
to migration, we share borders with peoples who mostly share versions
of our (ancestral) religion and increasingly inhabit
functional democracies, and the population balance between North and
South America is just much more, well, balanced than the differential
between Europe and the regions to its south.
Of
course Latin America isn’t the only source of U.S. immigration, and
Africa’s demographic surge will probably have repercussions for American
in-migration and domestic
politics as well. But still I’m doubtful that the issue would play
quite the same role in a real populist-nationalist upsurge that it has
in Europe; it would have to be subsumed into broader fears about
American economic and geopolitical decline – the (defensible
and bipartisan) sense that while our very existence may not be at
stake, our public institutions are in decay, our military can’t win
wars, our leaders are corrupt, and in every other way we simply aren’t
the America (!) that we have traditionally imagined
ourselves to be.
That
this argument would be expressed and championed, at present, by a
magnificent specimen of decadence like the Donald – a coarse
much-married Richie Rich-cum-crony
capitalist who boasts about bribing politicians and exploiting
bankruptcy laws to enrich himself – is perhaps an irony, or perhaps
simply the way that these things inevitably go (as the Berlusconi
example suggests). The best way to think of Trump, it seems
to me, is as a parody of a send-up of how Americans like to imagine
themselves. But perhaps a decaying imperium simply conjures up the
critics it deserves.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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