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.
***
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.
