Europe's Elections: Right, But Not Far

By Robert Royal It's worth paying careful attention to the significant gains recently by so-called "hard right" parties in the European elections. They tell us something not only about a whole group of kindred nations at this juncture in history, but also about what may happen this November in the United States as well. On the whole, it's good news that resistance has grown to the progressive juggernaut, which is most conspicuous by the rainbow flags that have sprouted all over the world. That "hard left" movement has been a far greater "threat to democracy" than its opponents, and the threat goes well beyond homosexual and trans questions to many other matters of culture, nationhood, and religion. Pope Francis and several European bishops have repeatedly warned against the "sirens of populism" and "simplistic solutions" to problems like massive illegal immigration - and the many disorders that inevitably follow. But Sweden - Sweden! - has become the rape capital of Europe, and experiences on average three stabbings a day, a bombing every other day, to say nothing of less spectacular troubles. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that maybe something's wrong with soft immigration policies - to say nothing of the whole post-Christian guilt complex about welcoming the stranger or wanting to preserve national identity. Sweden is hardly alone in experiencing such problems. Under the circumstances, simplistic solutions - like border walls, incarceration for criminals, and swift deportations - indeed, any real solutions at all, start to look better and better to people in dozens of nations compared to the status quo. The pope and many bishops - in America as well - tend to view the migrant problems through a very narrow lens, as if even having a border-control policy is basically contrary to the Gospel. Prior to COVID, America was admitting 2 million legal immigrants a year, odd for a supposedly xenophobic nation. Europe, too, had allowed large influxes of legal migrants. Blaming developed countries for not admitting even more, and then blaming them again because they can't integrate the huge numbers they've taken in - as many churchmen do - those are the simplistic solutions based in a kind of religious fundamentalism. Beyond such specific questions, the "populist sirens" and "simplistic solutions" now coming to the surface in many countries are not the product of "misinformation" or some warped ideology, as many politicians and religious figures would like people to believe. They're the response of tens of millions of people - in France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, and all over Europe - to what they experience every day, many saying that they "don't recognize" their own countries anymore. At a more practical level, people are also responding to other daily difficulties of little concern to elites. When Dutch farmers turn out to block roads because radical climate policies aimed at solving (elites hope) climate problems decades away have the practical effect of starving them in the present, and economies are weighed down by other items in the progressive wish list, it's no wonder that people aren't much concerned that the "center will hold." The center has become so ec-centric that it's a joke to think it represents some sort of prudent balance of legitimate interests. There's a perennial debate about whether politics is "downstream" from culture, or vice versa. The simple truth is: It depends. The two different forces don't stay put as time moves on. Sometimes one predominates, at other times the other. When Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, for example, only six states allowed abortion. In most of them, a Christian cultural understanding held it in check. After Roe, all that changed. The law, as the old saying goes, is a teacher. And Roe taught a lot of people a lot of lies about the Constitution allegedly protecting abortion under the cover of privacy (though strangely no one noticed this principle ...