In recent weeks, Americans have seen the shocking lengths to which the Deep State will go to prevent Donald Trump from returning to power.
There was his phony show trial in New York City, the result of which now allows the Democratic Party to describe Joe Biden’s rival as a “convicted felon.” The subsequent trial of Hunter Biden on gun charges made clear that Deep State actors—especially former senior intelligence officials—lied during the 2020 election about the incriminating evidence found in the younger Biden’s laptop. “Russian disinformation!” they cried. But it was true.
Meanwhile, this week in Europe, the European People’s Party made a shameful governing alliance with European parliamentary liberals, to marginalize conservatives who challenge the system. In a post on X, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán summed up its meaning with great clarity:
The result of the European election is clear: right-wing parties got stronger, the Left and the liberals lost ground. The EPP, on the other hand, instead of listening to the voters, finally teamed up with the socialists and the liberals: today they made a deal and divided the top jobs of the EU among themselves. They don’t care about reality, they don’t care about the results of the European elections, and they don’t care about the will of the European people. We shouldn’t be naive: they will continue to support migration and send even more money and weapons to the Russia-Ukraine war.
What EU elites are doing is maintaining a cordon sanitaire to keep popular conservative parties away from power. The Dutch establishment did this to keep Geert Wilders out of the prime ministership. This is what the French elites have done for decades against Le Pen’s party, though the massive vote for the National Rally in the recent European parliamentary balloting seems to have breached the wall. Eric Ciotti, head of the center-right Republicans, responded to the NR’s smashing victory by announcing the party’s intention to form a coalition with them. “Over our dead bodies!” screamed other party bigs, impotently. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
Now we are learning that the European Commission, which has let France escape censure for its flagrant violations of EU budget rules, is preparing to punish the country if Marine Le Pen’s National Rally makes substantial gains in the upcoming French parliamentary elections. The Commission fired warning shots on Wednesday, when France topped a list of EU countries reprimanded over its budgetary shortfalls.
“This will put [France] into what’s called an ‘excessive deficit procedure,’ which requires governments to take action to rein in their spending—and to set out in detail how they’re going to do it,” Politico said. “It’s a typically drawn-out EU process that can take years but ultimately they could be fined.”
None of these blatantly unprincipled maneuvers surprises any Hungarian conservative, as Hungary has been the whipping boy of Europe’s bureaucratic elites for years. So was Poland under the rule of the Law & Justice party; now that a properly tamed Euro-liberal, Donald Tusk, is in charge there, the Brussels bureaucracy has developed a strange new tolerance for Poland’s fiscal shortfalls.
The unelected members of the European Commission are using their bureaucratic powers in other ways to affect, or even nullify, the democratic wishes of European voters. Ursula von der Leyen has reportedly buried, at least temporarily, an EU report critical of Italy’s media environment, in a bid to win the support of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. For her part, Meloni has to operate knowing that her country’s indebtedness gives them a weak hand to play against Brussels, which holds the money cards.
Brussels’s hardball tactics seem to be working. Meloni, leader of the hard-right ECR bloc in the European Parliament, may have attempted to reverse the EU establishment’s rude snub of her earlier this week by throwing Orbán under the bus, refusing on Wednesday to allow Fidesz to join the ECR. To be fair to Meloni, other European populist parties reportedly also expressed hostility to Fidesz’s hopes to join the bloc.
Whatever the full truth, prospects remain bleak for a united Right. It appears that European elites have once again outmaneuvered conservatives. Conservatives must comfort themselves with the prospect that French voters will deliver such a resounding right-wing result in the coming weeks that Brussels bureaucrats are forced to reconsider their position. That, however, is the triumph of hope over experience.
How long can democratically unaccountable EU institutions—the European Commission, and even the European Central Bank, a supposedly apolitical entity that is not—get away with it? Answer: for as long as European voters let them. European polities will continue to get more of the same from these elites: more migration, more war, more centralized power at the expense of national sovereignty, and more gender ideology and other forms of wokeness. At a conference this week, a Romanian conservative lamented to me that all of his neighbors hate the Left-liberal politics of their government, but fear of putting their material security at risk cows them into silence.
This is untenable. Germany, for example, has been de-industrializing, partly under the influence of climate-change politics, and partly as a result of Germany’s fealty to the United States and its Russia policy. With public, pro-Hamas demonstrations all over the continent this year, Europeans can see perfectly well what third world immigration is doing to their countries. Nobody likes what Russia is doing to Ukraine, but Washington’s determination to wage a proxy war against Moscow to the last Ukrainian could very quickly become a catastrophe for ordinary Europeans, even as Americans live secure behind the barriers of the oceans.
At some point, this will stop. As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”
Europeans are willing to live under an undemocratic political order as long as it produces personal comfort. Indeed, the European Union is precisely that, despite its pretensions. But what happens when it ceases to work? What happens when that order delivers impoverishment, war, and the dissolution of communities and nations in the face of mass migration?
In a powerful and even frightening essay this week, historian Niall Ferguson explored the ways the United States these days mirrors the late Soviet Union. One of the signs, says Ferguson, is the large and growing disconnect between the leadership class (the nomenklatura, in Soviet terms) and the broad population that suffers from the policies the nomenklatura impose on everyone else.
Eventually, Europeans will cease to believe in the authority of the European Union, because the governing elites will have failed in ways that even the wishful thinking of see-no-evil voters can deny. Then what? Perhaps the historical model to observe is not the fall of the Soviet Union, but the collapse of Imperial Russia.
The Tsarist autocracy began losing legitimacy after its failed response to the 1891-92 famine, which shook the confidence of Russians in their rulers. Then Russia’s shocking loss to Japan in the 1905 war was a further blow to the monarchy. Economic precarity added to the instability, as did the unpopular imperial policy of “Russification,” in which the central state suppressed nationalities within the Empire.
Facing a revolution in 1905, the Tsar yielded to some reforms to save his throne, but ultimately proved too rigid to make the changes needed to maintain popular support. What happened in 1917 proved worse than anybody chafing under Romanov autocracy could have imagined.
COVID. Ukraine. Migration. The housing crisis. Diminished economic expectations. Hostility to legitimate expressions of national identity. A ruling elite that maneuvers to keep power for itself, and to serve its own interests, above the common good. Sound familiar?
Given Europe’s immense challenges, both internally and externally, and observing the inability of the ruling class at both the national and European level to deal effectively with them, something will have to give. If, as seems likely at this point, Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, the investment Hungary’s Orbán has made in their friendship could pay real dividends for Europe’s populists, who might have a powerful ally in the White House. The longer Europe’s deep-state nomenklatura puts off dealing with reality, the more ferocious and rabid reality’s eventual bite will be.
In the EU, the House Always Wins
Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash
In recent weeks, Americans have seen the shocking lengths to which the Deep State will go to prevent Donald Trump from returning to power.
There was his phony show trial in New York City, the result of which now allows the Democratic Party to describe Joe Biden’s rival as a “convicted felon.” The subsequent trial of Hunter Biden on gun charges made clear that Deep State actors—especially former senior intelligence officials—lied during the 2020 election about the incriminating evidence found in the younger Biden’s laptop. “Russian disinformation!” they cried. But it was true.
Meanwhile, this week in Europe, the European People’s Party made a shameful governing alliance with European parliamentary liberals, to marginalize conservatives who challenge the system. In a post on X, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán summed up its meaning with great clarity:
What EU elites are doing is maintaining a cordon sanitaire to keep popular conservative parties away from power. The Dutch establishment did this to keep Geert Wilders out of the prime ministership. This is what the French elites have done for decades against Le Pen’s party, though the massive vote for the National Rally in the recent European parliamentary balloting seems to have breached the wall. Eric Ciotti, head of the center-right Republicans, responded to the NR’s smashing victory by announcing the party’s intention to form a coalition with them. “Over our dead bodies!” screamed other party bigs, impotently. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
Now we are learning that the European Commission, which has let France escape censure for its flagrant violations of EU budget rules, is preparing to punish the country if Marine Le Pen’s National Rally makes substantial gains in the upcoming French parliamentary elections. The Commission fired warning shots on Wednesday, when France topped a list of EU countries reprimanded over its budgetary shortfalls.
“This will put [France] into what’s called an ‘excessive deficit procedure,’ which requires governments to take action to rein in their spending—and to set out in detail how they’re going to do it,” Politico said. “It’s a typically drawn-out EU process that can take years but ultimately they could be fined.”
None of these blatantly unprincipled maneuvers surprises any Hungarian conservative, as Hungary has been the whipping boy of Europe’s bureaucratic elites for years. So was Poland under the rule of the Law & Justice party; now that a properly tamed Euro-liberal, Donald Tusk, is in charge there, the Brussels bureaucracy has developed a strange new tolerance for Poland’s fiscal shortfalls.
The unelected members of the European Commission are using their bureaucratic powers in other ways to affect, or even nullify, the democratic wishes of European voters. Ursula von der Leyen has reportedly buried, at least temporarily, an EU report critical of Italy’s media environment, in a bid to win the support of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. For her part, Meloni has to operate knowing that her country’s indebtedness gives them a weak hand to play against Brussels, which holds the money cards.
Brussels’s hardball tactics seem to be working. Meloni, leader of the hard-right ECR bloc in the European Parliament, may have attempted to reverse the EU establishment’s rude snub of her earlier this week by throwing Orbán under the bus, refusing on Wednesday to allow Fidesz to join the ECR. To be fair to Meloni, other European populist parties reportedly also expressed hostility to Fidesz’s hopes to join the bloc.
Whatever the full truth, prospects remain bleak for a united Right. It appears that European elites have once again outmaneuvered conservatives. Conservatives must comfort themselves with the prospect that French voters will deliver such a resounding right-wing result in the coming weeks that Brussels bureaucrats are forced to reconsider their position. That, however, is the triumph of hope over experience.
How long can democratically unaccountable EU institutions—the European Commission, and even the European Central Bank, a supposedly apolitical entity that is not—get away with it? Answer: for as long as European voters let them. European polities will continue to get more of the same from these elites: more migration, more war, more centralized power at the expense of national sovereignty, and more gender ideology and other forms of wokeness. At a conference this week, a Romanian conservative lamented to me that all of his neighbors hate the Left-liberal politics of their government, but fear of putting their material security at risk cows them into silence.
This is untenable. Germany, for example, has been de-industrializing, partly under the influence of climate-change politics, and partly as a result of Germany’s fealty to the United States and its Russia policy. With public, pro-Hamas demonstrations all over the continent this year, Europeans can see perfectly well what third world immigration is doing to their countries. Nobody likes what Russia is doing to Ukraine, but Washington’s determination to wage a proxy war against Moscow to the last Ukrainian could very quickly become a catastrophe for ordinary Europeans, even as Americans live secure behind the barriers of the oceans.
At some point, this will stop. As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”
Europeans are willing to live under an undemocratic political order as long as it produces personal comfort. Indeed, the European Union is precisely that, despite its pretensions. But what happens when it ceases to work? What happens when that order delivers impoverishment, war, and the dissolution of communities and nations in the face of mass migration?
In a powerful and even frightening essay this week, historian Niall Ferguson explored the ways the United States these days mirrors the late Soviet Union. One of the signs, says Ferguson, is the large and growing disconnect between the leadership class (the nomenklatura, in Soviet terms) and the broad population that suffers from the policies the nomenklatura impose on everyone else.
Eventually, Europeans will cease to believe in the authority of the European Union, because the governing elites will have failed in ways that even the wishful thinking of see-no-evil voters can deny. Then what? Perhaps the historical model to observe is not the fall of the Soviet Union, but the collapse of Imperial Russia.
The Tsarist autocracy began losing legitimacy after its failed response to the 1891-92 famine, which shook the confidence of Russians in their rulers. Then Russia’s shocking loss to Japan in the 1905 war was a further blow to the monarchy. Economic precarity added to the instability, as did the unpopular imperial policy of “Russification,” in which the central state suppressed nationalities within the Empire.
Facing a revolution in 1905, the Tsar yielded to some reforms to save his throne, but ultimately proved too rigid to make the changes needed to maintain popular support. What happened in 1917 proved worse than anybody chafing under Romanov autocracy could have imagined.
COVID. Ukraine. Migration. The housing crisis. Diminished economic expectations. Hostility to legitimate expressions of national identity. A ruling elite that maneuvers to keep power for itself, and to serve its own interests, above the common good. Sound familiar?
Given Europe’s immense challenges, both internally and externally, and observing the inability of the ruling class at both the national and European level to deal effectively with them, something will have to give. If, as seems likely at this point, Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, the investment Hungary’s Orbán has made in their friendship could pay real dividends for Europe’s populists, who might have a powerful ally in the White House. The longer Europe’s deep-state nomenklatura puts off dealing with reality, the more ferocious and rabid reality’s eventual bite will be.
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