The descendants of those Europe sent to the West who have led the broad stream of emigration are now foreign to us even though flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. It is not the big water that separates the citizens of the Union from us but the nature of the country has produced the difference. She has assimilated her conquerors, equipped them with all the advantages and disadvantages that are her own. Its quality of greatness is also part of the characteristic of the inhabitants of the United States and is undeniable but is however not rarely transformed into the bizarre, the grotesque, even the repugnant.
—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, New York, 7 October 1893
The massive victory of Donald Trump was greeted with jubilation by populists and ‘right-wingers’ all over Europe—to say nothing of the United States. Certainly they all feel a particularly odious bullet has been dodged, and I would be wrong to rain on that parade. Trump has won the presidency; both Houses of Congress have Republican majorities; and the Supreme Court is friendly. In a word, politically speaking, he has complete control of the federal apparatus of the United States of America for the next two years, as Boris Johnson had over Britain’s Parliament in 2019. Responsibility for the waste of that majority and the resulting ascent to power of the unspeakable Sir Keir Starmer lies entirely with Johnson; should the same malfeasance happen over the next two years in America, it shall likewise be solely Trump’s responsibility.
For many of my countrymen, especially in my hometowns of New York and Los Angeles, Trump is simply the devil incarnate. Friends of mine were devastated by his victory; one proclaimed himself suicidal. For them, he is about to usher in a new age of darkness, with racism, homophobia, sexism, and all the rest triumphant. It shall be the reign of the toothless redneck, of the great unwashed with their guns and beer. Everything that is good, true, and beautiful shall be destroyed, and America is entering a new dark age. It is a vision I cannot share.
On the other hand, a great many of my friends feel just the opposite. The end of wokery is at hand, and all that is broken in this country shall be healed. The economy shall bloom, we shall have peace abroad and prosperity at home. The floods of immigration shall halt, and the land I was born in shall re-emerge, the stars and stripes flying high. This too is a vision I cannot share.
Of course, these two visions speak as much of the irreconcilability of the two mental nations that cohabit in these United States as they do of anything else—and I fear that fissure at least as much as they fear their opponents. My own worries about Trump center around his abandoning the pro-life cause, and what I can only describe as his lack of an ideological core. He was never against same sex ‘marriage,’ although he has made some anti-trans comments. The above-mentioned complete control will bring out his strengths and weaknesses; if his presidency is a failure, he’ll have only himself to blame. We can only wait and see.
But presuming a complete success on his part, the question for Europeans must be what effect his presidency shall have on Europe, and folk who consider themselves like-minded in the Mother Continent. These latter consider Trump’s victory a victory for themselves, even as the elites are shaking—not least Sir Keir, who allowed Labour Party workers to go to the States to help out with the Harris campaign. Nor are they entirely wrong to do so—at least in the very immediate.
But understanding the future relationship between America and Europe requires an honest evaluation of the two parties—as offered by Franz Ferdinand in the opening quotation. On the one hand, Americans are indeed Europeans, like the other settler nations; in the pithy phrase of Otto von Habsburg, “Europe really extends from San Francisco to Vladivostok.” That said, there are real differences between these two branches of the European family, as Otto’s great-uncle observed. Even in terms of seeming ideological allies there are differences, as I have written elsewhere in these pages. But beyond definitions of conservatism, it must be understood that American and European populism are far from being the same thing—and this shall have huge implications for a future in which both forms of populisms may be dominant in their respective spheres.
Back in 2019, Paul Gottfried wrote a particularly penetrating article in The American Conservative. Entitled “American and European Populists are Talking Past Each Other,” its tagline was “On the issue of U.S. hegemony, they have fundamental disagreements.” He then goes on to explore what he sees as their biggest similarities:
Both are obviously concerned with the globalist threat to their national economies and cultivate a rhetorical style that appeals to the plain folk while ostentatiously bypassing the ‘uppers.’ All so-called populists invoke national symbols and colors (thus Trump tells us that all Americans, no matter their race, ‘bleed red, white, and blue’). All ridicule multinational corporations and their usually socially leftist advocates as rootless. All have antagonistic relationships with left-wing media and devote considerable energy to contending with them.
He adds that both oppose immigration—although also mentioning that the Muslim issue puts the question into a different light in Europe.
But Gottfried then zeroes in on the important differences between the two: “European populism looks real, while its American counterpart seems contrived.” American populists, he writes, “identify the American nation with an ‘idea.’ This ‘idea’ is found explicitly in the passage of the Declaration of Independence that tells us that ‘all men are created equal.’ Lincoln’s victory over the slave-holding South and America’s military crusades for democracy in two world wars are often viewed as efforts to advance this founding ideal of equality.” Now, regardless of what one thinks of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, any educated European will be aware that American intervention in the First World War led directly to the Second and worse one. But Gottfried goes on to explain,
While other, presumably inferior, nations are based on ethnic membership, shared religious traditions, and histories going back millennia, the U.S. is supposedly morally superior because of our universal founding principles. Those who argue this are entitled to their beliefs, but out of such abstract universals it is hard to fashion a specifically populist movement. That is because populism, for better or worse (I’m not being judgmental here), depends on very different unifying factors, like all the stuff that our would-be populists keep throwing on the junk heap. Hungarian, Polish, French, and Italian populists happily invoke everything that our populists are not supposed to believe.
To further emphasize the difference between American and European Populists, Gottfried then writes:
One could hardly imagine an American populist saying what Viktor Orban repeatedly stated before the Hungarian national election that he won overwhelmingly in the spring. Orban vowed to “keep Hungary safe and Christian,” and called for the country—and Europe more widely—to embrace “a modernized version of Christian democracy” in the decades ahead. “Christian democracy protects us from migration, defends the borders, supports the traditional family model of one man, one woman, and considers the protection of our Christian culture as a natural thing,” he said.
This is simply not something Trump could honestly say in America—it is not just that he might not believe it himself—it certainly would not go down well with a huge chunk of Americans of any ideological coloring.
Now, at this point, why should this matter to Europeans of the populist variety? Surely Americans can do their thing and Europeans theirs? It is really not that simple. Gottfried goes on to show how Trump, when president the last time, essentially invoked American hegemony over Italy’s internal affairs:
It was the Trump administration that [in March 2019] put pressure on Mattarella not to authorize a coalition led by someone [Matteo Salvini] who might not be obedient to the American government on foreign affairs. It was only after this American ‘veto’ was removed and proper assurances were offered that Salvini in May was allowed to form a government. If this is what American populist leadership looks like, it may not be the case that Steve Bannon’s alliance is just around the corner.
More importantly, if a new Trump administration maintains the bipartisan traditions of American foreign policy going back to 1898, which most famously led to Wilson’s pushing the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns off their thrones, Roosevelt backing Tito against King Peter of Yugoslavia, Truman supporting the overthrow of Umberto II in Italy, Bush Senior vetoing the restoration of the Kings of Romania and Bulgaria, and Bush, Jr. that of the King of Afghanistan—ultimately ensuring our defeat in that country. Needless to say, American influence has always been brought to bear against any sort of establishment of Christianity as a State religion anywhere in Europe. But alongside Subsidiarity and Solidarity (which postwar Christian Democrats in the American Zone of Europe were allowed to maintain; those in the Soviet Zone were not permitted even those), Altar and Throne were two of the pillars which gave the Continent its identity and cultural power.
Rediscovery of these four pillars is essential to Europe’s recovery of its identity and its independent place in the world, alongside a sense of collective self, based upon what Otto von Habsburg would call the Reichsidee, the Imperial ideal. Nothing could be further from the minds of Americans in general, nor of President Trump and his advisors—nor, to be fair, of anyone likely to inhabit the White House. The good news, however, is that our internal divisions and our having to deal with the Near East and the Far will quite likely mean that Europe occupies less of our attention. Therein lies Europe’s opportunity to regain her soul without our interference.
Now, at this point, one might well wonder why an American such as myself might wish so fervently for the Mother Continent to regain her soul, and so eventually her cultural and political power in the world. The answer goes back to Gottfried’s assertion that “European populism looks real, while its American counterpart seems contrived.” The American ideology of which Gottfried writes is essentially an artificial messianic faith—and its failure at home has spawned wokeism. What is true and real in America is not that, but the Christian foundations our European ancestors brought, and which we have in many ways elaborated in good and productive ways—sometimes even achieving with them what Franz Ferdinand considered “greatness.” But all too often our pursuit of an undefined “freedom” as an abstract good, divorced from Christianity or anything supernatural has produced what the murdered Archduke deemed “the bizarre, the grotesque, even the repugnant.” This in turn has come to dominate our popular culture, which we have exported across the planet without benefitting ourselves one iota.
So long as the Mother Continent is divorced from herself, her daughters, to include the United States, cannot be healthy. But if she regains her soul, their healing too can begin. The United States is far more than an abstract ‘idea.’ They are a country rich in resources and energy—both natural and human. If these were at last employed in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful—as our founding colonists and many later immigrants intended—it would be a great day in the history of Mankind. But this cannot be expected so long as the Continent from which we derived all that is best in us is sunk so deeply in self-doubt and despair—some of it wrought by ourselves and our onetime Russian partners, but a great deal self-inflicted.
