One would not like to become overconfident about the coming European election results—the steady-on advice of The European Conservative’s Ellen Fantini is a must-read—but perhaps we can allow ourselves a moment to savor the taste of flop sweat oozing from the pores of anxious liberals. They sense that something terrible is about to happen to them, and they don’t know what to do.
Notwithstanding the embarrassing and ridiculous statement AfD’s Maximilian Krah made in an interview—is it really so hard for these people to avoid going soft on the SS?—the European Right seems headed for victory. Most voters likely understand that the deep and urgent crises facing Europe, especially over uncontrolled migration, are far more important than whether or not a German politician can keep his big mouth shut about the Nazis. And they also know that the liberal parties (including the traditional conservative ones) not only don’t have solutions, but their policies caused the crises in the first place.
In the United States, five months from voting, the presidential election is shaping up to be a rout of the enfeebled incumbent Joe Biden. This week I had drinks with a Trump-hating journalist friend from New York, on vacation in Budapest. He has resigned himself to a second Trump term in the White House. Biden’s pathetic weakness and confusion is on daily display for the cameras, as if he were the star of a reality show titled, “America: The Chernenko Years.”
Five years ago, the anti-Trump right-liberal David Frum published a cover story in The Atlantic, a leading center-left magazine, in which he said, “If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.” A provocative headline, yes, but his point was a sound one: ordinary people hate uncontrolled migration, and long have. If the left-liberal (Democrats) and right-liberal (Republicans) political parties won’t get control of borders, voters can hardly be blamed for turning to right-wing politicians who will. As Frum told National Public Radio at the time:
Immigration is not the only driver of the authoritarian populism that is besetting democratic institutions, but it is maybe the most proximate, most urgent. And so I’m imploring people to understand the power of this issue and the need to bring immigration into some kind of order if you’re going to sustain, not only democratic institutions, but open trade, the European Union, other institutions of the liberal world order.
That was five years ago! The migration problem, both in Europe and in the United States, has only grown worse—and liberal elites of both the center-right and center-left still have no idea how to deal with it. The new EU migration pact proposes to deal with the problem by forcing European countries that have had sensible border policies to pay the price for those states who have failed. At some point, as the quality of life in European cities plummets because of migrant-caused crime, and native-born Europeans can see, in the Islamist political demonstrations of the last year, the harsh cost of their elites’ foolishness, voters will have had enough.
My New York journalist friend asked about why Hungary seems to have taken the lead on the migration issue. My theory, I told him, is that the 1919 Trianon Treaty, about which no Americans have heard, taught the Hungarian people an unforgettable lesson about how fragile their nation is when it falls under control of external forces driven by utopian ideals. Magyars know in their bones that the only people who can be counted on to defend the Magyars are … the Magyars.
Today, I explained, Europe is ruled by a transnational governing elite guided by sentimental progressive attitudes towards migration that are as powerful as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, which played a powerful role in establishing the postwar European order. Because of their history, and because they are a small nation with a distinct language, the Hungarians understood first and better than almost anybody that mass migration into Europe was a poison pill for European civilization.
For many years now, European political and media elites have answered the pro-sovereignty arguments of Viktor Orbán and other politicians by calling them “fascist,” “authoritarian,” “racist,” and so on. Meanwhile, the migrants keep coming. At some point, the scare language doesn’t work anymore. Maybe that point will have been reached on June 9th—D-Day for Europe’s failed liberals.
What’s more, the entire panoply of normative liberalism is up for a referendum. In America, the Biden administration has enthusiastically embraced every social policy goal—on race, on LGBT—of the Democratic Party’s far Left. This same revolutionary passion has also been highly visible among Democrats at most levels of government, especially in so-called “blue states,” run by liberals. The results are coming in—and they don’t look good for the Left.
A few days ago, Mike Schmidt, a liberal Oregon district attorney who has been backed by George Soros money, lost his re-election bid to Nathan Vasquez, a candidate to his right. Multnomah County is Portland, Oregon, which has been plagued by drug abuse and Antifa violence.
Progressivism in power—and not only political power—is tearing society apart. One of the world’s top medical schools, the Geffen School at University of California Los Angeles, has brazenly ignored state law forbidding taking race into account in deciding who they admit. UCLA has admitted racial minorities who don’t meet minimum academic standards. The shocking (though predictable) result, according to a blockbuster new report: half the medical students there fail basic tests. Sources there told journalist Aaron Sibarium that the school is graduating doctors who don’t know how to practice medicine.
This is what happens when you attempt to engineer society according to utopian schemes, rather than reality. A funny campaign poster for Italy’s Lega party captures the insanity that a vote for the liberal status quo would sustain:
What Lega and other parties of the serious Right want is nothing more and nothing less than a return to normality. Natural families, for example, not pregnant men. Martin Gurri, a former analyst for the CIA, describes the conflict now splitting Western politics as The Elites vs. The Normies. He writes:
The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.
The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”
Gurri adds that “the elites are driven entirely by their impulse to control.” We are now seeing how far they will go to prevent the kind of people Hillary Clinton once denounced as “deplorable” come to power. In the U.S., Donald Trump is on trial in a New York courtroom on absurdly frail charges—a courtroom procedure so transparently political that it will probably make him stronger, no matter the verdict.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the news media are working their propagandistic alchemy on the recent assassination attempt on Slovak premier Robert Fico. Writing in the conservative Slovak magazine Standard, Peter Stevkov points out that both Slovak and foreign media highlight the past radical-right rantings of Juraj C., as the accused killer has been identified by police, but downplay his much more recent hateful scribblings about Fico and Trump, and his open support of the anti-Fico opposition. The truth is, Juraj C. seems to have been a rage-filled lunatic with no fixed political conviction. Yet many in the media seemed determined to make a man who tried to kill Slovakia’s president into the face of right-populism.
That black magic is probably not going to work this time. Liberal New York Times columnist David Brooks, always a good barometer for respectable mainstream centrist thinking, can read the handwriting on the wall. He offers weak and watery advice for liberals on how to compete politically with populists, concluding tepidly:
It’s looking like this year’s elections will be won by whichever side stands for change. Populists promise to tear down systems. Liberals need to make the case for changing them in a comprehensive and constructive way.
Nearly a decade after Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in Manhattan and announced his presidential candidacy, a good and intelligent man like David Brooks still doesn’t understand the world in which he lives. The conflict is not ultimately about style; it’s about substance. The Brookses of the world are so convinced that they are the good guys on the Right Side of History that they cannot comprehend that their vision is fatally flawed, and that voters just might have had enough of it.
For them, liberalism can’t fail; it can only be failed. If the populist right parties win in Europe on June 9th, and if Donald Trump prevails on November 5th, don’t expect an honest, introspective reckoning from these elites. Rather, anticipate for blaming Russia, blaming Orbán, blaming anyone and everyone other than the man in the mirror.
The liberal elites are the authors of decline and dissolution. They wouldn’t defend borders, they wouldn’t protect families, they wouldn’t guard free speech, they wouldn’t uphold reasonable standards of competence, and they wouldn’t prevent radical Islam from taking hold in European cities and American campuses. All they can say now is that those who call out their catastrophic failures are bigots and fascists for noticing.
Fine. Let the elites work toward their own well-deserved irrelevance. The Normies have countries and civilizations to save.
Rod Dreher is an American journalist who writes about politics, culture, religion, and foreign affairs. He is author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not By Lies (2020), both of which have been translated into over ten languages. He is director of the Network Project of the Danube Institute in Budapest, where he lives. Email him at [email protected].
Revolt of the Normies: Voters Seem Ready to Restore Common Sense
One would not like to become overconfident about the coming European election results—the steady-on advice of The European Conservative’s Ellen Fantini is a must-read—but perhaps we can allow ourselves a moment to savor the taste of flop sweat oozing from the pores of anxious liberals. They sense that something terrible is about to happen to them, and they don’t know what to do.
Notwithstanding the embarrassing and ridiculous statement AfD’s Maximilian Krah made in an interview—is it really so hard for these people to avoid going soft on the SS?—the European Right seems headed for victory. Most voters likely understand that the deep and urgent crises facing Europe, especially over uncontrolled migration, are far more important than whether or not a German politician can keep his big mouth shut about the Nazis. And they also know that the liberal parties (including the traditional conservative ones) not only don’t have solutions, but their policies caused the crises in the first place.
In the United States, five months from voting, the presidential election is shaping up to be a rout of the enfeebled incumbent Joe Biden. This week I had drinks with a Trump-hating journalist friend from New York, on vacation in Budapest. He has resigned himself to a second Trump term in the White House. Biden’s pathetic weakness and confusion is on daily display for the cameras, as if he were the star of a reality show titled, “America: The Chernenko Years.”
Five years ago, the anti-Trump right-liberal David Frum published a cover story in The Atlantic, a leading center-left magazine, in which he said, “If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.” A provocative headline, yes, but his point was a sound one: ordinary people hate uncontrolled migration, and long have. If the left-liberal (Democrats) and right-liberal (Republicans) political parties won’t get control of borders, voters can hardly be blamed for turning to right-wing politicians who will. As Frum told National Public Radio at the time:
That was five years ago! The migration problem, both in Europe and in the United States, has only grown worse—and liberal elites of both the center-right and center-left still have no idea how to deal with it. The new EU migration pact proposes to deal with the problem by forcing European countries that have had sensible border policies to pay the price for those states who have failed. At some point, as the quality of life in European cities plummets because of migrant-caused crime, and native-born Europeans can see, in the Islamist political demonstrations of the last year, the harsh cost of their elites’ foolishness, voters will have had enough.
My New York journalist friend asked about why Hungary seems to have taken the lead on the migration issue. My theory, I told him, is that the 1919 Trianon Treaty, about which no Americans have heard, taught the Hungarian people an unforgettable lesson about how fragile their nation is when it falls under control of external forces driven by utopian ideals. Magyars know in their bones that the only people who can be counted on to defend the Magyars are … the Magyars.
Today, I explained, Europe is ruled by a transnational governing elite guided by sentimental progressive attitudes towards migration that are as powerful as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, which played a powerful role in establishing the postwar European order. Because of their history, and because they are a small nation with a distinct language, the Hungarians understood first and better than almost anybody that mass migration into Europe was a poison pill for European civilization.
For many years now, European political and media elites have answered the pro-sovereignty arguments of Viktor Orbán and other politicians by calling them “fascist,” “authoritarian,” “racist,” and so on. Meanwhile, the migrants keep coming. At some point, the scare language doesn’t work anymore. Maybe that point will have been reached on June 9th—D-Day for Europe’s failed liberals.
What’s more, the entire panoply of normative liberalism is up for a referendum. In America, the Biden administration has enthusiastically embraced every social policy goal—on race, on LGBT—of the Democratic Party’s far Left. This same revolutionary passion has also been highly visible among Democrats at most levels of government, especially in so-called “blue states,” run by liberals. The results are coming in—and they don’t look good for the Left.
A few days ago, Mike Schmidt, a liberal Oregon district attorney who has been backed by George Soros money, lost his re-election bid to Nathan Vasquez, a candidate to his right. Multnomah County is Portland, Oregon, which has been plagued by drug abuse and Antifa violence.
Progressivism in power—and not only political power—is tearing society apart. One of the world’s top medical schools, the Geffen School at University of California Los Angeles, has brazenly ignored state law forbidding taking race into account in deciding who they admit. UCLA has admitted racial minorities who don’t meet minimum academic standards. The shocking (though predictable) result, according to a blockbuster new report: half the medical students there fail basic tests. Sources there told journalist Aaron Sibarium that the school is graduating doctors who don’t know how to practice medicine.
This is what happens when you attempt to engineer society according to utopian schemes, rather than reality. A funny campaign poster for Italy’s Lega party captures the insanity that a vote for the liberal status quo would sustain:
What Lega and other parties of the serious Right want is nothing more and nothing less than a return to normality. Natural families, for example, not pregnant men. Martin Gurri, a former analyst for the CIA, describes the conflict now splitting Western politics as The Elites vs. The Normies. He writes:
Gurri adds that “the elites are driven entirely by their impulse to control.” We are now seeing how far they will go to prevent the kind of people Hillary Clinton once denounced as “deplorable” come to power. In the U.S., Donald Trump is on trial in a New York courtroom on absurdly frail charges—a courtroom procedure so transparently political that it will probably make him stronger, no matter the verdict.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the news media are working their propagandistic alchemy on the recent assassination attempt on Slovak premier Robert Fico. Writing in the conservative Slovak magazine Standard, Peter Stevkov points out that both Slovak and foreign media highlight the past radical-right rantings of Juraj C., as the accused killer has been identified by police, but downplay his much more recent hateful scribblings about Fico and Trump, and his open support of the anti-Fico opposition. The truth is, Juraj C. seems to have been a rage-filled lunatic with no fixed political conviction. Yet many in the media seemed determined to make a man who tried to kill Slovakia’s president into the face of right-populism.
That black magic is probably not going to work this time. Liberal New York Times columnist David Brooks, always a good barometer for respectable mainstream centrist thinking, can read the handwriting on the wall. He offers weak and watery advice for liberals on how to compete politically with populists, concluding tepidly:
Nearly a decade after Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in Manhattan and announced his presidential candidacy, a good and intelligent man like David Brooks still doesn’t understand the world in which he lives. The conflict is not ultimately about style; it’s about substance. The Brookses of the world are so convinced that they are the good guys on the Right Side of History that they cannot comprehend that their vision is fatally flawed, and that voters just might have had enough of it.
For them, liberalism can’t fail; it can only be failed. If the populist right parties win in Europe on June 9th, and if Donald Trump prevails on November 5th, don’t expect an honest, introspective reckoning from these elites. Rather, anticipate for blaming Russia, blaming Orbán, blaming anyone and everyone other than the man in the mirror.
The liberal elites are the authors of decline and dissolution. They wouldn’t defend borders, they wouldn’t protect families, they wouldn’t guard free speech, they wouldn’t uphold reasonable standards of competence, and they wouldn’t prevent radical Islam from taking hold in European cities and American campuses. All they can say now is that those who call out their catastrophic failures are bigots and fascists for noticing.
Fine. Let the elites work toward their own well-deserved irrelevance. The Normies have countries and civilizations to save.
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