24 November 2004 Blog Home : November 2004 : Permalink
Michael Totten has written an insightful TCS column about the banning of the Vlaams Blok and the Theo Van Gogh murder and the resultant feedback. He makes a number of excellent points (so go read the whole thing) but at one point he utters what would seem to be blindingly obvious but seems to have got lost somewhere in translation by the cozy Eurorulers:
Nothing breeds that sort of freelance violence like the perception that the duly constituted authorities aren't willing to protect the citizenry. People in the United States didn't doubt that; people in the Netherlands have had reason to.
If Europe's mainstream parties can't come to grips with this they're toast. There is no shortage of political maniacs on the margins -- who are totally uninhibited by political correctness -- who can always propose a "solution" if no one else will.
This is something that seems to have been forgotten by governments all over Europe. We citizens pay our taxes for services like the police to protect us and catch thieves, murderers and rapists. It is true that this is not the only thing we pay for but it is a highly visible use of our tax money and one that we consider to be a basic threshold of governance. If it isn't met then there isn't too much point in paying for the rest of the government. Melanie Phillips has a story about how Political Correctness appears to have impacted the (lack of) police investigation of Asian gangs in Scotland. I have no doubt that swift googling would show other similar stories elsewhere - certainly I recall seeing similar stories at Zacht Ei.
In an article sparked off a comment I made (go read it too), Michael Gordon aka the Buggy Professor makes some excellent points about how there is no single cause for the rise of right wing populism in Europe and implies that I thought there was a single cause - immigration and Islamic fuundamentaism. I appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the rise is due to multiple factors and agree with him on that and on his further perceptive note that freedom of speech and religious toleration is not nearly as well embedded in the European mainstream as it is in the English speaking world. I did not in fact believe that there was a single cause to explain right wing popularity and remain of that belief. However where I disagree with the perceptive professor is that I think his multitude of causes are in fact interlinked. The problem here is that, like the US, citizens feel insecure. They feel threatened by globalization, by an uncertain retirement, by rising crime, terrorism and so on. Each of these elements has its own causes and itself leads to other problems but it seems to me that there is one underlying problem and that is that discussion of these problems or of certain viewpoints is generally speaking taboo. The taboo doesn't hold so much in bars, clubs and so on but it very much holds in terms of public discourse. There is very limited debate permitted in the national media - indeed in much of Europe there is very little choice in terms of viewpoint available in the national media - and this, I believe, is the key difference.
In the US, despite the general liberal bias of the chattering classes (as documented in Bernard Goldberg's Bias), there are alternative viewpoints readily available. Rush Limbaugh and his fellow talk radio hosts, not to mention Fox, provide a right wing view to complement the liberal mainstream. Likewise, as the professor notes, in the UK there is a wide variety of viewpoints expressed with (for example) the Torygraph and the Times being more conservative and the Grauniad and Independant being more left wing. This doesn't really exist in mainland Europe and the national debate is weaker as a result.
Brief aside: I was at a party on Sunday where I disclosed that I was becoming more and more of a Torygraph reader and would soon be writing letters as "Disgusted of Mouans Sartoux". To my surprise a significant proportion of the crowd (mainly expat Brits but with a wide variety of professions, ages and wealth) was in general agreement with what I might call the Torygraph viewpoint. While there was disagreement with my pro-Bush views there was considerable agreement with the anti-Labour, anti-Chirac, anti-PLO, anti-EU viewpoints. I have noted similar reactions back in the UK from people whom I would normally put in the "moonbat" camp. Extrapolating from this meager anecdotal evidence, the UK Independance Party, if it can get its act together, is likely to be a more significant force in UK politics than the mainstream media imagines.
The lack of diverse viewpoints doesn't matter when times are good, but it is critical at times when things are not so rosy. The average European feels insecure for good reason. Crime is rising, the EU (or at least the Eurozone) is in poor economic shape, and there seems no good reason to expect that this will improve.
The problem, as elucidated so well by Michael Totten above, is that the mainstream politicians in Europe are in a state of denial. They simply do not want to admit that their policies have failed utterly and that Europe is now in a real mess with an unintegrated and increasingly radical Islamic minority as well as high structural unemployment and an upcoming pensions crisis that makes worries about the US budget deficit look like a storm in a teacup. To cap it all, rather than allow an EU commisioner who stated that he would not allow his religious personal beliefs to interfere with his public acts, they prefer to have ones who are convicted (but pardoned so that's all right) bribe-takers and fraudsters.
The result of this process, also stated by the Buggy Professor in the article mentioned above is that more and more people become alienated from mainstream politicians who either ignore or fail to provide convincing solutions to genuine problems felt by their voters. The natural result is that extremist parties, who are not afraid to mention these problems (and who generally have solutions to them that are simplistic, racist and wrong), pick up votes from people who do not in general share their more extremist beliefs. This I believe is precisely why the Vlaams Blok has become so hugely popular, it has identified a couple of majpor problems with Belgium - essentially non-assimilated immigrants, crime and a large wealth transfer through taxation from the Flemish north to the Walloon south - that resonate strongly with Flemish voters. Ironically, apart from their professed free market nature, the party they remind me most of is the Bloc Québécois, a party that one suspects receives quite a lot of support in the Francophone parts of the world including Walloon Belgium.
It is notable that in France Nicolas Sarkozy has become immensely popular because he has admitted what no previous minister had the intestinal fortitude to admit - namely that France has a huge crime problem and (now that he has moved to the treasury) a serious budget problem. I have some serious reservations about some of his proposed solutions but compared to his predecessors and colleagues he is outstanding, simply because he states problems and then not only suggests solutions but actually goes and implements them. Compared to the usual European style of stating a problem , having a large amount of "consultation" with interested parties and then passing a law deploring the problem that no one will obey anyway this is quite revolutionary. As a result he is not very popular with M. L'Escroc who is doing his best to sink the Sarkozy bandwagon and seems to forget that he was elected in large part due to a campaign to "Vote for the crook not the fascist". If, as is not impossible, a fascist such as Le Pen faces off either M. L'Escroc or another corrupt inneffective traditional politician at the next election it is by no means certain that the fascist will lose. However if the fascist faces off against Sarkozy there is no doubt who will win and it won't be the fascist.
There is another political problem that is also denied, and that is political corruption. Now I am being slightly unfair here because I do believe that the majority of national politicians in Europe are not directly and overtly corrupt. They do not generally take money under the table from some shady businessman and they probably see the all expenses paid fact finding tour to the beaches of Slobistania as a perk rather than a bribe. Indeed they may be no worse than their fellow politicians in N America, Japan etc. except for one detail: they twist the laws so that their corruption is hidden and if it is found out it rarely seems to affect their future careers. In the UK, the US and even in Japan or Korea, politicians who are caught on the take face years of investigative journalists, angry electorates as well as criminal trials that result in serious sentences. In continental Europe, as we discover with the current French commisioner, the penalty is generally a few months notoriety followed by a quiet job in some international body or other. Even though this works for the politician concerned in the short term, in the long term it undermines trust in the political system and reinforces the view that the elite consider themselves above the law.
There is a logical conclusion here which really worries me. Mainstream European politicians are generally considered inneffective and corrupt. They don't seem to respond to the beliefs of their electorate and there seems to be one law for the politically conected and another for everyone else. I am not sure of prevailing European opinion but I suspect that, as in the UK, the general public wants far harsher sentences for criminals, however politicians and the media seem more concerned with the rights of criminals than their victims and so on. To put it bluntly the law-abiding tax-paying man in the street is not having his needs met by his rulers and to add insult to injury he has to pay large amounts of tax to support this state of affairs. This is not a stable situation and means that the "law-abiding tax-paying man in the street" will look for alternatives.
If the only alternatives are extremist politicians then it is quite possible that just as the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s led to Hitler and the like the same will happen today. It is also quite possible that we will see some sort of anarchy and breakdown of the rule of law, especially if the ruling elites seem to remain above the law. Whether this then leads to tyranny or not we cannot know. The one thing that I am sure of is that without radical reform the current situation is not going to last.