The European Crisis
In Europe as in the United States, recent trends in culture and economics have elevated an educated upper class while separating it, geographically and ideologically and in every other way, from a declining and fragmenting working class.
In Europe as in the United States, a growing immigrant population serves this upper class while seeming to compete with downscale natives for jobs, housing and social benefits. In Europe as in the United States, the center-left coalition has become a kind of patronage arrangement between the multicultural meritocracy and minority groups both new and old, while the white working class drifts rightward and votes for Brexit, Trump and now Le Pen.
.. these problems are worse in Europe, part of a systemic crisis that’s more serious than our own.
They’re worse because Europe is stuck with a horribly flawed experiment in political economy, a common currency without a common fiscal policy or a central political authority capable of claiming real legitimacy.
.. They’re worse because Europe has had sub-replacement fertility for much longer than the United States
.. mass immigration seem more culturally threatening to natives even as it seems more desirable to technocrats.
.. They’re worse because Europe is a continent of ethno-states without a strong assimilative tradition
.. Finally, they’re worse because European governance has a greater democracy deficit than the United States, and because the European ruling class already relies more than its American counterpart on illiberal methods — restrictions on speech that would be the envy of our campus commisars, counterterrorism methods that would make Jeff Sessions blush, even the spread of “voluntary” euthanasia as a solution to age and illness and unhappiness — to maintain the continental peace.
.. This is a tangle of problems that no single statesman or party, however brilliant, is likely to cut through; they can be only managed, not resolved.
But much of elite European politics seems to be organized around the premise that they are really problems only because they might lead to an extremist party taking power. So the important thing is to concentrate every effort on delegitimizing and defeating and excluding critics (be they right wing or, as in many Mediterranean countries, far left) rather than solving the problems that the outsiders often quite accurately identify.
.. the policy alternative that the right-wing populists often offer —
- hard limits on immigration, new financial support for families,
- a re-emphasis on national sovereignty,
- the unwinding of the euro
— is in some ways less extreme than the open-borders and onward-to-federalism fantasies still nursed by the elite
.. in which secularism gives ground to religious pluralism even as it firmly demands certain forms of assimilation.