Trump and Sanders Are Turning Us Into Europe

By Gareth Harding

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

BRUSSELS — The shock waves Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have sent through American politics this year aren’t just from their unexpected popularity or their relentless table-thumping. It’s because they’ve totally upended American ideas about what our political parties stand for. Trump’s strange mix of policy ideas casually throws overboard years’ worth of carefully honed Republican talking points about taxes and religion, while Sanders simply ignores the hard-won, generation-long Democratic shift to the political center with his rants against money and power.

What’s going on? As confusing as this might be in the States, it looks clearer from overseas: America is getting its first big dose of European politics.

Trump’s support of the social safety net coupled with unabashed xenophobia and protectionism might not be familiar to American voters, who are used to having their “conservative” politics be strictly anti-welfare, pro-trade, and low-tax. But it is immediately recognizable to supporters of the plethora of right-wing parties topping polls across Europe. Likewise, Sanders’ open embrace of socialism may shock Americans—but hardly raises an eyebrow in Europe, a continent where socialist parties are either in government or constitute the main opposition.

Even the two central character types in the latest installment of America’s hottest political drama are familiar to Europeans. A brash billionaire businessman with populist politics, coarse speech and a knack for self-promotion, who enters the political arena and trumps experienced rivals by pledging to make his country great again? That would be Silvio Berlusconi, a former cruise-ship crooner turned media magnate who set up his own political party in 1994 and within months was prime minister of Italy — a post he held four times.

Donald Trump, a more fully coiffed but equally vulgar American version of Berlusconi, may be contemptuous of Europe: He recently predicted the old continent was headed for “collapse,” and described Brussels as a “hellhole.” But his nativist politics could be lifted straight out of the playbook written by Europe’s increasingly successful populist parties.

Sanders is not as easy to lampoon as Trump, but to Europeans, his elevation to leading man status in the Democratic primaries has a familiar ring about it. Last year, Jeremy Corbyn—a 65-year old, hard-left firebrand with no front-bench experience, the media skills of a Trappist monk and a political philosophy most thought had fallen with the Berlin Wall—became leader of the Labour Party, Britain’s main opposition group. As with Sanders, most commentators dismissed Corbyn as “unelectable”—right until he was duly elected.

American voters are increasingly turning to candidates who owe scant allegiance to the parties whose nomination they are seeking. Trump was once a registered Democrat; Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, once described the Democratic Party he recently joined as "morally bankrupt." A similar phenomenon is happening in Europe, where centrist parties have either been hijacked by politicians on the fringes (like Corbyn), or squeezed by radical groups on the left, such as Syriza in Greece, and the right, like the Danish People’s Party in Denmark. When populists cannot find a mainstream party to accommodate them, they simply set up their own party—such as the nationalist Finns Party currently flying high in the polls.

Populist insurgents on both sides of the pond have tapped into widespread anger at the social and economic devastation left by the recession. In Greece and Spain, almost half of young people are jobless, providing fertile ground for left-wing parties like Syriza in Athens and Podemos in Madrid. The unemployment rate in the United States is only half that in Europe, but Trump and Sanders have each succeeded in channeling the discontent and frustration of Americans who see rising growth but lower household incomes. When 70 percent of American voters tell pollsters they think the country is headed in the wrong direction, it is hardly surprising that candidates representing continuity, like Hillary Clinton, find it a tough slog to persuade electors to plump for them. To complicate matters for Clinton, she’s not merely defending herself from Sanders to her left; looming in the distance is Trump, who is as protectionist as most blue-collar Democrats and a staunch defender of Medicare.

In the U.S., Sanders is considered a firebrand for supporting free higher education and public healthcare funded by tax hikes. But in Europe, these ideas would put him right in the mainstream of a Christian Democrat party. After all, it was center-right Chancellor Angela Merkel who, in 2014, introduced a minimum wage in Germany. In the same year, she abolished university tuition fees.

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Extremist parties have never been popular in the United States, which in recent history has featured two pretty similar parties scrapping for the center vote. But now Trump and Sanders are questioning two of the central myths on which America was built—immigration and capitalism—and it could be a sign that the U.S. is getting its first taste of the deep ideological divisions that Europeans have lived with for decades.

To be fair, in Europe they have very different, and more troubling, roots. Fascist and communist parties ruled large swaths of the Continent for much of the 20th century. Even after Nazism was defeated and the Communist bloc collapsed, the ghosts of the twin ideologies refused to die. In the late 1990s, neofascist parties entered government in Italy and Austria. Far-right parties—such as Marine Le Pen’s National Front and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom—are currently topping polls in France and the Netherlands, respectively, while populist demagogues such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico have won high office by appealing to the base instincts of voters. On the left, unabashed Marxist Alexis Tsipras has led Greece for over a year, and in Spain, the anti-austerity Podemos party of Pablo Iglesias is poised to join the Socialists in government.

Europeans, who tend to be less politically correct than Americans, are used to politicians doing outrageous things. Like siring a child out of wedlock and then secretly getting the state to pay for her flat (former French president Francois Mitterrand). Or holding orgies with underage girls (Berlusconi). Or blacking up for a charity event (as the foreign minister of Belgium, Didier Reynders, did last year). They are also used to leaders who, like Trump, use foul language to connect with voters—as former French president Nicolas Sarkozy famously did when he told a youngster “beat it, asshole,” and Czech President Milos Zeman did when he referred to the Russian punk band Pussy Riot as “fucked up” “sluts” on live radio. So while many Europeans express justifiable outrage at Trump’s misogyny, Islamophobia and plans to build a wall to shut out Mexicans, they happily elect leaders who erect fences to keep migrants out (Orban) or think it’s a smart idea to confiscate jewelry from refugees fleeing war-torn states (Danish premier Lars Løkke Rasmussen).

This casual European brazenness hasn’t quite taken over in America, but the U.S. is getting there. Gone are the days when presidential candidates tried to look and sound like reassuring bank managers—think John Kerry or Mitt Romney. In the 2016 race, Republican presidential wannabes are desperately trying to outbid each other in shock value and shamelessness. Through Trump, in particular, America seems to be discovering its suppressed id. When he calls a reporter a “bimbo”—as he did to Fox News host Megyn Kelly—or indirectly refers to fellow candidate Ted Cruz as a “pussy,” he sees his poll ratings climb. And when Cruz calls President Barack Obama a sponsor of terrorism, he knows his base will be kept as happy as tabloid headline writers.

Macho posturing and crude campaigning styles aren’t the only traits Trump has in common with his European rightist bedfellows. They’re also aggressively nationalistic, fiercely anti-immigrant and Islamophobic, have a deep distrust of federal governments (whether in D.C. or Brussels), largely protectionist on trade issues, favor strong welfare states, and lionize “virile” leaders like Vladimir Putin. For his part, Sanders sounds a lot like his leftist counterparts in Britain, Spain and Greece when he preaches the virtues of “democratic socialism” and rails against greedy bankers, casino capitalists and bloated billionaires.

There are, of course, limits to how European U.S. politics is becoming. In fact, in some sense they are switching places. The United States’ response to the economic crisis was to spend its way out of recession; Europe’s was to cut spending to reduce debt. It is the French—those “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” of “Simpsons” lore—who are calling for muscular military action in Syria and post-Qadhafi Libya, while the U.S. has so far resisted. And when it comes to campaign financing, Europe is still as parsimonious with its money as it is with its ice cube rations and soda servings. The total cost of the 2010 U.K. general election was around £226 million—with most of the bill footed by the state. That’s less than the money raised by Clinton and Sanders thus far, with over nine months to go until the presidential election.

“Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus,” wrote former White House official Robert Kagan in 2003, alluding to the differences between the U.S. and EU over the use of military power. The world’s two biggest economic blocs still do politics differently. Europeans can’t believe filibustering and gerrymandering are still alive in the 21st century; Americans think the same way about archbishops sitting in the House of Lords, or Spanish Socialists going to the Royal Palace, pleading with a hereditary monarch to form a government. But when it comes to growing ideological cleavages and the electorate’s increasing tolerance of intolerance, the two sides of the Atlantic are growing closer than they think.