European Elections and Cultural Marxism
Over the weekend more than 400 million people in the EU were voting on parliamentary elections. Americans usually could care less about European politics.
The results so far are being called an “earthquake.” The media, both European and US, lump all European conservatives as “far-right.” Most headlines are about the gains made by the “far-right.”
Today, what is “far-right” might include thinking a nation should have borders, a man can’t have babies, that COVID-19 vaccines don’t work, and that Hamas is not something you have with Naan bread. But who knows, things could be different in Europe.
However, it seems all manner of anti-immigrant and anti-Green parties were successful. The European Left took a real drubbing.
The “far-right” made some stunning gains, especially in large influential France and Germany. Things went badly for Belgian socialists and Victor Orban did very well in Hungary. But the Left lost in smaller countries like Austria and Ireland as well. The outspoken populist head of Italy seems to have emerged as the deal-maker for the European Parliament. She has been an outspoken opponent of illegal migration.
We are not experts on European politics, which has a dizzying number of political parties of all hues on the political spectrum. However, established parties did poorly, the Greens did poorly, and the more right-tilting parties made large gains. That seems like a fair summary.
The tactical considerations about potential coalitions aside, why did this happen and does it foretell something about the political shifts occuring in America?
No doubt this subject will be analyzed by a host of commentators, but here is our quick take: it is an electoral rebellion against the elites who have directed Europe since the fall of The Wall. It was anti-establishment national populist conservatism winning at the polls.
Like the US elite, European political leaders embraced and promulgated key elements of cultural Marxism. Prominent among these views is the idea of cultural relativity. All cultures are equally valid. Also, Western civilization is not superior, and certainly not worth defending, and because of collective guilt against people of color, wholesale importation of Muslims from North and Central Africa is a good thing for our civilization. Europe is the oppressor, and all migrants deserve European benefits because of past colonialism.
Sounds familiar, does it not? That is because the International Left, and the institutions it has captured like the EU, the UN, The International Court, The World Economic Forum, and numerous NGOs, largely reflect the view of the Democratic Party in the US. The International Left is…international.
I think it was Gaad Sad who coined the term “suicidal empathy”. Under the influence of cultural Marxism, the West has become so obsessed with the state of the downtrodden, and assumes guilt for it, that as a society, it wants to commit suicide over that misplaced guilt. This is what European elites are proposing to their citizens.
Many Europeans have second thoughts about the wisdom of such policies and the political reaction reflects that shift.
In short, it is the argument for open borders. The idea of open borders is logically downstream from the idea that all cultures are equally virtuous because virtue is simply a matter of opinion and a cover for our oppression of others. And since all cultures are equal, why not let everyone enter? After all, your culture and country are not worth any special effort to preserve, besides you are guilty of racism and exploitation.
It is also downstream from the Left’s obsession with equality. If other societies don’t achieve our wealth and freedom, it is our fault, not theirs. We must share what we earned with those who have not. Open borders are also a “share the wealth” scheme.
In the West, after much struggle between church and state, and rebellions against power, the West achieved a merger between Athens and Jerusalem. It was the logic of Greece and the morality of Judeo-Christianity. It achieved an understanding between faith and science. From that, a distinct legal and political system evolved. From the resulting freedom, came immense prosperity. The changes from 1750 or so to the present are the most significant change in the standard of living ever seen in the history of the human race.
This “Great Enrichment” according to economist Deidra McClosky, began in Holland, spread to England, and then to England’s North American colonies. It sprung from liberalism and the idea that the common man had the right to keep the product of his labor and investments and that all things did not belong to the Crown, the state, or the landowner. Each person “owned” himself, and thus could not be owned by another.
This was a difficult and painful process fraught with setbacks and bloodshed. We should not feel guilty because of it. If the Third World wants prosperity, they need to work on free markets and free institutions. Institutions like free markets, the rule of law, and limitations on government power, do not spring from nowhere. They require certain philosophical antecedents and the acceptance of religions and cultures supporting the ideas of personal freedom. Those who don’t accept the premises of liberty do not have the right to invade by war or peaceful mass migration the civilizations of those who do. They may come at the discretion of the host country, provided they assimilate into the greater society.
Western Europe has a more difficult problem than the US. Their wave of illegals is primarily Muslim and they pose a serious assimilation problem. We are not saying open borders are wise, even if migrants are easily assimilated. We are just saying Europe has a more difficult issue with many of its migrants.
The Muslim faith has always been a conquering faith. Shortly after the death of Mohammed, Muslim armies conquered a huge hunk of Northern Europe, expanded into Southern Europe, into China, all of the Middle East, and even into the Pacific. There has likely never been a colonial power equal to them. They not only took territory, they imposed their religion and culture, literally building their Mosques on the rubble of Jewish Temples or Christian churches.
It is also an all-encompassing faith that proscribes the treatment of women and families, the lower status of those outside the faith, the conduct of commerce, and the nature of government. They are entitled to live the way they wish to, but despite what their religion says, they don’t have the right to spread their civilization by force.
But cultural Marxism teaches the surrender of Western values because all cultures are equal. The “evils” of colonialism can only be committed by white Europeans. Just like blacks can’t be racists in the US, Muslims cannot be colonialists. The latter just does not square with history and the former does not comport with the present.
Not all Muslims are Islamists pushing a political agenda, but many are, and it is very difficult to sort out. How can we look into the heart of men during mass migrations? Besides, many get radicalized after the move to a Western country with the approval of our elites and the universities they dominate.
How is the importation of an alien and aggressive Muslim civilization going to square with European ideas of family and the treatment of women? How does the sexual freedom of the Netherlands and France jibe with burkas, female genital mutilation, child marriage, and honor killings? It cannot mix, especially when one side believes it has the right to spread its faith by force and violence.
European elites have systematically covered up the crimes against women in Europe and the general rise in crime. The people know about it, even though European institutions wish to ignore it.
How do democratic norms and Western law jibe with Sharia? In truth, they don’t and can’t.
European voters have every right to be concerned about the importation of an alien culture dangerous to their prosperity and very way of life.
It is also clear from the thundering defeat of the Greens, that communism via environmental zealotry is little different from communism through revolution or invasion. You wind up at the same place… poor and living under tyranny. The attack on CO2 emissions, nitrogen fertilizer, bovine flatulence, and even the idea of farming itself, has been under assault all over Europe by their socialist elites. Farmers and others have risen in opposition but their voices were not heard.
Well, they have been heard now.
The arguments for “climate change” are not self-limiting. If you believe man is destroying the earth and is the sole cause of climate change (how is it the climate has always been changing), then everything in your life can be regulated by the government. Where you live, what fuels you can use, how you are allowed to move about, what you can eat, how you can cook it…there is no end to it.
The political earthquake will hopefully shake European leaders out of their Marxist-induced coma. The Green Movement and open borders are destroying Europe. Many commentators think it is already too late to save, given the demographic reality.
The message to the US is to not go down the European road. It also says quite loudly that populist conservatism is a political force to be recognized. It boils down to the defense of Western Civilization. That is what “right-wing” and ” far-right” apparently have come to mean.
We should take heart that European voters are starting to rebel politically speaking.
We have seen Brexit, and we have seen the Canadian truckers. We have seen individual European countries rejecting the open borders, socialist, globalist, green agenda. We see MAGA in the US. But now, the entirety of the EU seems in play to one degree or another. While the political changes are heartening, they have a long way to go. That said, the elections were indeed a big deal.
This Fall, Americans will also have their chance to reject the tenets of cultural Marxism as well. The Democrats are the party of CRT, DEI, environmental extremism, transgenderism, and open borders.
Let’s have another political earthquake.
