The Right in European and American Politics: Disentangling Right from Right

The far-right in Europe has been quite different than the right-wing in American politics. Putting aside the usual caricature of “people in pointy hoods and the Ku Klux Klan,” Marine Le Pen said she still believed “the American right [was] much more to the right than the National Front.” She may have agreed with those who wanted to manage American frontiers more effectively and prevent massive illegal immigration, but she was also a big believer in the state’s ability and obligation to help its people. “We feel the state should have the means to intervene,” she said. “We are very attached to public services à la française as a way to limit the inequalities among regions and among the French,” including “access for all to the same level of health care.”[1] This statement implies that survival is a human right--something the American right has tended to eschew in favor of a survival-of-the-fittest mantra that conflates the state of nature with the interdependency in a developed economy. 

Therefore, it can be concluded that American right has been more far-right than the European far-right has been in terms of government having a responsibility to take care of people in need, even providing a survival-net so that no one need go hungry, homeless, and without medical-care. Of the latter, it took President Obama, a corporate Democrat, to widen the net on medical insurance, though even he caved to the private-insurance lobby, which threatened it would withdraw its support unless the president dropped his support for a public option.  

So from an American standpoint, it is particularly striking that the European right has consistently advocated universal health-care. To the American right, even a “public option” for government-run health insurance can only be odious socialism, which in turn, if generalized, could bring down the Union. Moreover, the American rich who retort, “I don’t want to help others with my tax dollars—just defense,” is absent from the E.U.'s far-right. This point demonstrates a real cultural divide between the E.U. and U.S. 

In terms of federalism, the “Euroskeptics” have been much more skeptical of the E.U. than the state rights advocates in America have been of the federal-level of governance in the U.S. Even though in both unions secession movements have resulted from the Euroskeptic ideology, it has had more influence in terms of the constitutional design of the E.U.'s federal system as well as in European politics. For example, the governor of Hungary came to the defense of Poland when the federal Commission went after the latter for subjugating the judiciary to politics. In terms of federalism, the European right is more to the right than is the American right.

Immigration is another policy area in which the European right is further right. France's president Sarkozy’s attempt to send the Roma out of his state makes Arizona's Jan Brewer’s proposal to allow her state's police to verify the citizenship of people already involved in a police action seem down-right moderate. Whereas in the spring of 2011 the Danish government considered putting up border guards to keep African immigrants out, the Arizona government did not add border guards of its own in 2010. To be sure, U.S. President Trump did exactly that in 2018, perhaps to keep certain peoples out or to stop drug-trafficking and illegal immigration. In European far-right politics, going after particular peoples already legally in the E.U. has been fair-game. In the E.U. state of Belgium, some establishments in the Flanders region as late as 2010 have brandished signs stating “No Walloons Allowed”—similar to “No Blacks Allowed” in Alabama until the 1970s. It would be interesting to compare racism in the E.U. against Africans with racism in the U.S. against Black Americans (who go by the misnomer of African-Americans, which is an ethnic rather than a racial designation).

Perhaps it could be said that whereas culturally and in terms of federalism the European right has been more to the right, the European value of solidarity has moderated that far-right appreciably, whereas the right-wing in American politics has known no such moderating factor. Therefore, caution should be exercised when comparing seemingly-parallel parties in American and European politics. The two unions have rather distinct politics even though “right” and “left” apply to both unions. 

For more comparisons, see Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

1. Tracy McNicoll and Christopher Dickey, “What a Tea Party Looks Like in Europe,” Newsweek, September 6, 2010.

Real or Incremental Change?

On October 13, 2010, Fox News reported a poll that found that women were turning on Obama.  The reason cited was that they feel there has been too much change—that it has been “jarring.”  I was stunned—wondering if I was listening to a broadcast from another planet. I remembered that when I had been sampling a fattening food item in a grocery store in my antiquated home town in Illinois; the old woman who gave me the sample, said, “We have lots of devils here!” as she was handing me the sample.  She was referring to the array of food samples in the store that day a few weeks before Thanksgiving.  My reaction, which I charitably did not share with her, was, Oh, horrors! I wondered what century she was from (probably Calvin's, I concluded privately as I chewed a “devilish” olive). I wondered, moreover, why some people magnify little things into horrendous sins. Such people, I concluded, cannot seem to let go of what is to the rest of us so utterly antiquated and get with it. That is, why are some people so resistant to change? Why do they perceive small, incremental changes as somehow momentous—even jarring?

In a preface to one of his books, Milton Friedman wrote, "Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When the crisis occurs[,] the action taken depends on the ideas that are lying around.” That is to say, human nature is not exactly designed in favor of substantial change—being more inclined to the incremental variety. When a culture says that real change is to be feared and people don’t bother to come up with a broad array of ideas, even a crisis may not result in real change. Such can be said of modern American society, even as “change” shows up consistently in American political campaigns.

In terms of the jarring change being reported on Fox News, the journalist pointed to the health-insurance reform law as a case in point.  In spite of its purported “socialism,” the law relies on private health-insurance companies, whose lobby pressured Obama into dropping his “public option” requirement and adding a mandate that requires Americans to become customers of those companies.  If relying on extant private companies—giving them a guaranteed and vastly enlarged customer base—is somehow “jarring” change, I have to start wondering about whether some people have a pathological issue with change itself.

One need only point to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law of 2010, which subjects banks deemed too big to fail to additional capital requirements and requires the banks to develop liquidation contingency plans. This “change” pales in comparison to breaking up the banks having $1 or more trillion in assets so they do not pose a danger while extant. That some people might find increasing capital requirements as jarring boggles the mind. Are such people familiar with real change—even if they voted for it in 2008? I suspect they would not recognize it if it jumped up and bite them on their asses, and yet political campaigns are ostensively all about change—or the illusion thereof—but just enough to tell people what they want to hear.

Not surprisingly, much of the campaigning in the 2010 midterm elections was oriented to incremental change on a variety of issues, rather than to real change, even though the latter would have been more fitting given the systemic negative effects of the financial crisis of 2008. Even in states bordering on bankruptcy, like California, Florida and Illinois, campaigning as usual belied any purported crisis. 

For example, I watched a candidate forum that was being held in Illinois and one of the main questions was why a candidate’s business was so successful.  Meanwhile, the last governor had been impeached and removed from office by a nearly-unanimous vote in the legislature, and the government was borrowing $18 billion in 2010 alone.  The forum struck me as an exercise in “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” as if the ship of state was not on the verge of sinking.  In other words, it was business as usual in a context that demanded substantial change. Clearly, the candidates knew of Illinois’s fiscal (and corrupt) condition. It occurred to me that they were either bereft of ideas or too accustomed to going along on the track of status quo to proffer any real alternatives. Lest one heap all the blame on the candidates at the forum, it is important to note that it was a citizen of Illinois who asked about the candidate’s business. Perhaps the society in Illinois is too entranced by custom and thus insufficiently equipped for real change—ironically even as one of Illinois’ former U.S. senators was serving as the “real change” president of the United States.

Lest the pallid phenomenon be presumed to be limited to the heartland, the California Governor’s race between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman also evinced politics as usual. The two candidates had a chance in their debates to persuade a California-wide audience that they could turn around the economically-troubled republic. Instead, they resorted—at least in their third debate—“to many of the personal attacks that have dominated the last few weeks of the campaign,” according to MSNBC, whose verdict can be said to apply to American politics even in the wake of a crisis: “Neither candidate presented any new ideas.”

Source:

Jeff Madrick, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2011).