The June 6-9 European elections are of high significance not only to Europe, but also to the United States. Why? Because polls indicate that the vote might well demonstrate, more strongly than ever, the refusal of everyday Europeans to allow the governing elite of the EU to continue its deconstruction of the democratic and prosperous West and all the blessings it has brought. On both sides of the Atlantic, our shared Western heritage is under attack by an ever more militantly secularist cultural establishment and the progressive politics that serves it. The traditional idea of limited and accountable government that exists to secure the inalienable rights of its free and sovereign citizens is a consummately Western idea. It arises out of the West’s Judeo-Christian worldview, the conviction that all human beings, created in God’s image, possess equal dignity and rights; that political power, because of human fallenness, cannot be unchecked nor concentrated in too few hands; and that politics is not mankind’s ultimate end, but rather a tool to enhance human flourishing, under God, within proper moral boundaries.
Today’s elites do not understand that. They believe only in politics. Their grandiose political schemes have crowded out the traditional, salutary idea of limited government and replaced it with a consuming, complex and unaccountable form of global governance that amasses ever more power to itself, recognizing few limits in its foolish pursuit of a near-perfect world that can never be. See, for example, the EU’s utopian war on national sovereignty and the preference of American progressives for globalism over patriotism; the radical environmentalism of the ruinous European Green Deal and the Biden administration’s obsession with climate change, green energy, and green jobs; the postmodern ideologies of gender fluidity and sexual libertinism according to which advocacy of biblical morality is hate speech (the Päivi Räsänen case in Finland is only the most egregious of several examples); and the utopian multiculturalism and cultural self-repudiation that has led to porous borders and uncontrolled immigration in Europe and the United States.
In these European elections, people appear ready to rebel against such absurdity. Civilizationalist conservatism, as represented by the so-called populist Right, has a chance to gain enough support to begin—I emphasize the word “begin”—to turn the rudder of Europe back toward the sovereigntist, Judeo-Christian traditionalism that has made the West—Europe and North America—what it is: the freest, most just, and most prosperous civilization that has ever existed.
It is crucial that these are EU-level elections. The European Union is Europe’s principal battleground in the fight between civilizationalist conservatism and anti-Western progressivism. The main question in EU politics is whether the EU will be an organization facilitating the peaceful cooperation of sovereign, democratic nations, or a supranationalist power grab set to replace democratically accountable national governments with an authoritarian superstate. The European project as conceived of by EU elites is the central example of anti-Western political utopianism: it is animated by the ideology of global governance—the belief that one can achieve an unprecedented degree of global peace, stability, and prosperity by subordinating national governments and domestic law to a global ‘rule of law,’ in which elected national governments cede their sovereignty to supranational institutions without the consent of the governed.
In the U.S., we face an analogous situation. Like the political establishment in the EU, the American Democratic party is no longer reliably a civilizationally Western party. It advocates the same things as the political elite in Europe, including a utopian worship of global governance, and despises traditionalist conservatives. Radical environmentalism threatens to ruin our economy, inhibit our travel, and impoverish our diets. The U.S.-Mexico border is an utter disaster. Freedom of speech, religion, and thought are threatened by political correctness, identity politics, and cancel culture, which all arise from the overweening schemes of those who believe only in politics.
But there is a key difference between the United States and Europe, one that has long affected transatlantic relations: the EU is farther along in the development of post-Christian progressivism than is the U.S. Thus, the populist Right in Europe, often maligned as the ‘far Right’ or ‘extreme Right,’ is astonishingly similar to the majority of the mainstream Republican party in the United States. I am not referring to outliers such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene or the Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. I’m not even talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about the average Republican politician or voter—someone like Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson—and the Judeo-Christian traditionalism that motivates their politics.
By establishment European standards, almost half of Americans fall decidedly to the right of the right edge of the mainstream political spectrum in Europe. Even if Europeans would rarely say it out loud (with the exception of what is routinely said about Donald Trump), one could truly make the case that, as far as the political and cultural elites of the EU are concerned, American Republicans are de facto ‘extreme’ Right. This has long been a huge problem in transatlantic relations, even before the advent of woke progressivism. Transatlantic tensions under Reagan were bad enough, despite Reagan’s huge policy achievements. George H.W. Bush got a pass, because his foreign policy was dominated by the exigencies of the moment: managing the fall of the Soviet Union and accomplishing the reunification of Germany and the democratic transformation of the former Soviet satellite states. Under George W. Bush, U.S.-EU tensions got worse, not primarily because of Iraq, but because Bush’s sovereigntism and traditionalist Christian worldview were unpalatable for the EU elite. Under Trump U.S.-EU relations reached a nadir, not primarily because of Trump’s personality but because Trump represented a populist, civilizationalist conservatism that EU elites found reprehensible, and that they thought they had killed off in Europe. Trump—and the American cultural conservatism that Trump represented in European eyes—had been relegated to the ‘extreme’ Right.
If wokeism continues to set the direction of EU politics and if wokeist intolerance continues to worsen, such attitudes could create a rift wide and deep enough to perhaps spell the end of the U.S.-Europe alliance. It is this circumstance that is a second reason the European elections are so important for the United States. If the populist Right does as well as expected in the European elections, American conservatives might no longer be so alone in the West. Civilizationist conservatives in the U.S. might find that they have not just a small minority, but a critical mass of counterparts in Europe with whom they can collaborate to preserve and strengthen freedom, democracy, and prosperity.
The opportunity is huge, but with opportunity comes risk. The greatest danger is that conservatives, chafing under the unrelenting attacks of the establishment, forget that Western conservatism is not about politics first. It is not about the absolutization of the political, which is the root of political extremism. Putting politics first is the province of progressivism, which grows out of a worldview that believes in nothing outside of politics.
True conservatism never puts politics first. Western conservatism is about politics as a tool to help restrain evil, protect the good, and preserve the true and the beautiful. Conservatism and radicalism are mutually exclusive. Still, the extremist temptation exists in any political movement, and the critics are not always wrong in pointing out examples of extremism within the ranks of the populist Right. That is why civilizational conservatives must take great care to resist the extremist temptation and avoid political extremism.
A final point: no matter what the results of the European elections are, the long struggle to reinvigorate civilizational conservatism in the West will continue. On a practical level, there is every reason to expect that tremendous difficulties and obstacles will continue to stand in the way of developing a strong, solid coalition of conservative parties in the EU. And it must be said that, though civilizational conservatism is growing, conservatives are still decidedly in the minority.
Much more importantly, though, the real battle for Europe (and for the West as a whole) is not a political one, but rather “a battle for our souls,” as the Belgian thinker David Engels observes. Politics is downstream from culture, and not the other way around. Here it is helpful to bring to bear the concept of the social imaginary. The philosopher Charles Taylor defined the social imaginary as the way people “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie all these expectations.” The social imaginary is the cultural air we breathe—the unreflected assumptions, words, and behavior all around us that suffuse our everyday lives. Our Western social imaginary is progressive, postmodern, and deeply secularist. Its reach and effects are bigger than just politics. Much cultural and spiritual work will be required over the long haul in order to begin to change that.
Caught in the same Western social imaginary as Europeans, many Americans do not understand the significance of the June 6-9 European elections. They have been misled by a largely ignorant American media, including many otherwise good outlets, that parrot the standard dismissal of the populist conservatives as ‘extreme’ Right. But more and more Americans are learning, and many of us will be awaiting the results of the European elections with great interest.
