Marion Marechal, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Millei, Donald Trump, and political leaders in India, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and the Netherlands among other countries, have made a radical, dramatic turn to the right. Immigration was the straw that broke the camel's back in Europe. It is not so much an economic issue or even a civil one, says Marechal of France, but a cultural one.
The refusal of Muslim immigrants to become part of the national fabric, to be integrated into the country which offered them shelter, asylum, and opportunity, to deny the validity of French law and to demand a recognition of Sharia where the only law is Allah's law is anathema to France's ethos of equal citizenship. The religious, racial, and ethnic identity of anyone who becomes a citizen of France is irrelevant. All citizens are members of the French secular community and will behave with respect, tolerance, and respect for law, culture, tradition, and history.
France may become a demographically pluralistic culture, but it will never become a culturally divided, fragmented place of competing interests. Marechal of course stands on history - Charlemagne repulsed the Muslim Saracen armies and saved France from Islam, and since that decisive victory France has been known as la fille ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church. To let the country devolve into a quasi-Arabic state, one with values destructive to the very ethos of liberté, égalité, fraternité is unthinkable.
Poland, the Netherlands, and Hungary with no such storied and revered nationalistic history, have nevertheless valued the integrity of a culturally homogeneous nation. Immigrants are not unwelcome, they must simply become Polish - to be indistinguishable from native Poles, to practice traditions and beliefs other than those of the majority quietly and reservedly.
Poland has seen what uninhibited Muslim immigration has done to France - ripped it apart, torn the well-knit fabric that once held it together and under which there was indeed a commonality, a system of shared values. A country, said Marechal, is not just a collection of random individuals, each to his own, each living in a privileged, gated estate; but a bonded community reflecting a national identity.
Without such cultural identity what is the use of nations? Even America, a land with short history and a culture built on plurality and the economic opportunity of all - that is without the thousand-year history of kings, courtiers, czars, emperors, and shahs, a history which gave each nation a clear, well-defined, irreducible culture - is floundering in 'diversity', losing whatever cultural center it once had in its early days, a country without an ethos, a common set of mutually respected values. The chaos on the Southern border, although Christian and widely American, has only hastened the disruption of an already ragged ethical center.
It is no surprise that Erdogan and Putin look to the glory of the Ottoman and Russian Empires for inspiration. These were the halcyon years, the defining years, the years which made Turkey and Russia the identifiable, unique countries they are. Marechal and Le Pen are condemned for being 'far Right', nationalistic, focused on cultural integrity. They are racist xenophobes, their critics cry; but of course they are nothing of the sort. They have no shame or guilt in proclaiming the greatness of historical, white, Christian, European France and credit for leading Europe out of the Dark Ages into the modern world of ideas, art, literature, and science.
Putin and Erdogan are similarly harassed for their imperialistic designs. Putin needs to do more to include the Chechens, the Ossetians, and other of the smaller Islamic Russian republics; but he has adamantly refused, for these groups have not sought assimilation and integration, but separatism - a religious, ethnic, and cultural separatism which automatically impounds them in a strictly homogeneous enclave. And this separatism has been violent.
Immigration is not the only cause for a move to the Right. The desire for cultural integrity irrespective of immigration has been. India, with a long history of communal Hindu-Muslim violence and continued Muslim restiveness, has voted for a party while not official a Hindu party, has clear sympathies for the preeminence of Hinduism. There is no country where religion plays such an important, daily, almost all-consuming role. Faith and the celebration of it is everywhere, every day.
It is the defining identity of the country; and to strengthen its influence is to strengthen the country's cultural center. This Hindu nationalism does not imply anti-Muslimism, pogroms, Kristallnacht, the emptying of the Warsaw ghetto - just an acknowledgment that India is a Hindu country and owes its being, its historical integrity to its religion.
Immigration has also indirectly affected the political turn to the Right because of its permissiveness. The same laissez-faire, idealistic assumptions about inclusivity, heterogeneity, and diversity which opened European and American borders, infected every other aspect of civil life.
It is not a coincidence that the soon-to-be completed term of the liberal Biden administration in the United States, was pervasively permissive. America over the past four years has been an anything-goes place, even more than it has historically been; and by the end of Biden's term, and after such impossibly fantastical assumptions about the nature of diversity in a democratic society - transgenderism being the most obvious - American voters had had enough.
Enough black this, black that lionization of the African American and the tribal culture from which he had come; enough derogating of high European civilization for its oppression, depredation, and colonialism; enough dismissal of Christianity and Biblical injunction as outdated and irrelevant. America, for all its frays and raggedness; and for all the weakening and disappearance of its cultural center, was still Christian, Western, and European and proud of it. The country might be demographically diverse, but it still had a semblance of a cultural core which should be bolstered not dismissed.
Last but definitely not least European and American citizens were increasingly fed up with neo-socialist utopianism - and saw their tax dollars profligately spent on non-accountable giveaways, a largesse of incredible proportions with no promise of return on investment. A mindless, idealistic redistributive program with no sense of strict responsibility. If it felt good to honor diversity, equity, and inclusivity, then fund them, no questions asked.
Saving the environment at all costs was an insular, politically-motivated pipe dream with no consideration of economic impact or a real comprehensive balanced plan. It felt right to shut the country down as COVID hit. 'The science, the science', politicians hollered but followed only their instincts, each one of which led to an increasingly intrusive, authoritarian government.
This will all end in Trump's America, and so it will in the countries led by the likes of Marechal, Le Pen, Meloni, Milei, and Wilders. Javier Milei of Argentina stands in front of a board with the names of government ministries posted on it. One by one he throws each one to the floor shouting, 'Afuera...No hay plata'. No longer will the irresponsible spending of decades of Peronism continue. A final accounting has arrived.
The turn to the Right is not some hysterical xenophobic, racist conspiracy; but the natural result of a decade or more of oppressive progressivism. The times they are a-changin' and it is about time.
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