Europe’s “far right” is not America’s far right

Europe’s “far right” is not America’s far right

Infidels have rights, too

Peter A. Hempel – 11/04/25

There is a lot of alarm these days about how Trump and Trumpism are part of global rise of the “far right,” particularly in Europe. But I’m wondering if we are missing some fundamental differences between the US and Europe.

Trumpism is economically far right, bankrolled by dark money billionaires and the Heritage Foundation, culminating in Project 2025 – at least for now. Its goals are to cut taxes for billionaires, privatize public services, undo regulatory barriers of any sort (particularly environmental regulations), and shift all power – governmental and economic to the private sector/oligarchs. The primary architects of this thinking have little interest in social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, etc., per se. Many are political libertarians, whose only concern about social issues is not wanting to pay taxes.

Laid bare, this is a highly unpopular agenda and requires a highly charismatic master strategist to deflect attention from these anti-populist realities.

Trump brilliantly leveraged popular grievances, particularly racial grievances and hostility towards minorities and immigrants, along with a deep suspicion of outsiders and other countries. Ignoring his relentless personal and publicly documented record of lechery and financial corruption, he sucked up to the Christian evangelical movement, and in an act of egregious cynicism, they embraced him. He vilified experts and “expertise,” elite institutions such as top universities, and science and medicine – i.e. anyone who `might stand in his way – and celebrated the “uneducated.” He spoke to the frustration and anger of people who felt the system had failed them; he was the outsider who would “clean out the swamp.” His success is exemplified by the many “Trumpies” who have turned denialism about his history and his flaws into a necessary art, and now declare him as being sent by God to save the country.

There are many on the left who dismiss Trump’s appeal and see Trump's supporters as being motivated by racism, specifically white racism. It’s true, white nationalists love Trump. And he does not disavow them – “some very fine people.” But extreme white nationalists are only a small part of Trump’s supporters. He speaks to a much broader set of frustrations felt by everyone left behind by the system. Tellingly, in the most recent election, Trump substantially increased his support among Blacks and Hispanics, specifically non-college-educated males.

White nationalists may be reprehensible, but they confine their outreach efforts to other whites. (It’s hard to “convert” a black person to whiteness.) Basically, they are separatists. They are equal opportunity haters, with equal disdain for Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, etc.. Give them a state of their own, like Alabama or Mississippi, and they would be delighted. That “white” state would almost certainly end up at the bottom of the list of states in education, health, everything else, but it would be “pure.”

White racists in general, and many of the more “moderate” Trump supporters, fear the sheer numbers of immigrants who are competing for jobs, taking taxpayer dollars, and moving the country away from an imagined “more perfect” past. It is not any specific immigrant group that they demonize, it is all of them – all colors, all cultures, all nationalities – in aggregate.

My question is, is the “far right” in Europe made of the same stuff? My suspicion is that what we call “far right extremists” in Europe have arisen from a much more specific immigrant problem that they face than the immigrant problem in the US.

The majority of illegal immigrants in the US are from Latin American countries. They came to escape poverty or to escape political or cartel violence. They take a lot of low-level jobs, including agricultural labor, meat processing plants, service staff at hotels and restaurants, etc. Their agenda is to make money and to make better lives for themselves and their families, often including sending money to relatives in their home countries. They have no agenda to remake American society, they simply want to enjoy the benefits of American society, and participate in it.

The immigration problem in Europe is completely different. Of course, Europe has a long tradition of skinheads and neo-Nazis and Nazis, who are indeed rabid white racists. But, for the most part, post-war Europe has leaned towards tolerance and inclusion. (And secularism.)

None of that explains the larger anti-immigrant political movement in Europe. The European “problem” arises from the vast portion of immigrants who come from Muslim countries. Unlike Hispanic immigrants in the US, and Eastern European immigrants in Western Europe, whose religion and cultural values overlap with American/European Western values, Muslim immigrants, especially recent Muslim immigrants, bring with them a completely different set of cultural values and religious ideas. The ideals of religious freedom and tolerance are completely alien to their culture.

Certainly there are individual Muslims who would be happy to assimilate, and who in fact seek to escape oppressive Islamic society (of course, those who leave Islam are supposed to be put to death by the faithful), but a great many Muslim immigrants are absolutely out of touch with Western values, out of touch with the very concept of respect for women, have zero interest in tolerance, and want to transform Europe and turn it into part of the Islamic caliphate.

This cultural disconnect has been a problem for decades (or more accurately, centuries). I remember in the 1960s the Dutch were having huge problems with Muslim immigrants (from, I suppose, former colonies), and France was having problems with its Algerian immigrants. Germany began importing Gastarbeiters (“guestworkers”) from Turkey to provide a labor force to do construction and other manual labor and discovered they now had a growing population of Muslims that was almost wholly disconnected from – and resistant to – the culture and values of their country. In Paris, the offices of Charlie Hebdo (a satirical magazine) were attacked and staff members were massacred by Islamists who were outraged by a political cartoon depicting Mohammed. (Even in the US, newspapers and magazines decided not to republish the cartoon out of “cultural sensitivity” – or, perhaps, fear of… offending people who might kill them?)

These countries are highly secular, as is Western Europe generally, and they were faced with a population of immigrants who had no understanding of or appreciation for secularism. In fact, these newcomers hated the very idea of a state untethered by religion. And they hated infidels – their hosts.

The recent wave of immigration from countries in the Middle East and Africa has ramped up all these problems on steroids. To be sure, the war in Syria created a refugee crisis and a humanitarian crisis, one that demanded attention and called for sympathy. Europe was forced to look for ways to accommodate refugees in such obvious need.

The sheer volume of immigrants inevitably strained the social services capacities of host countries. Such huge numbers of refugees inherently reduced the rate of assimilation. In addition, liberals in many of these countries were reluctant to impose assimilation as a requirement or even a goal. They wanted to allow immigrants to keep their culture (the multicultural model), and not even bother learning the language of the host country. They bent over backwards to accommodate the new arrivals with schools that taught in their language and a curriculum that reflected their cultural sensitivities, and welfare benefits that strained national budgets.

In spite of, and perhaps in part because of, these well-intended efforts, a significant portion of these immigrant populations rejected the idea of assimilation, and now wants Europe to adopt Sharia law as the law of the land – for everyone.

The uncomfortable fact is: Islam is different. There is a strain within Christianity that seeks to evangelize and convert others to the faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses may come knocking at your door. The Mormons send their members on missions to other countries to evangelize much the same way that military service was a rite of passage for young men until the end of the draft.

But none of these groups demands that everyone convert. Yes, Europe had the Inquisition – but then it had the Reformation. None of the Christian denominations (at least these days) seeks to convert by the sword. But conversion by the sword is what Islam does. And believers are commanded to do so by Mohamed, the infallible prophet.

In the US, freedom of religion is a founding principle – the very first amendment to the Constitution. We are a melting pot. We are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion. The same holds true in modern Europe. Could Europe turn away refugees because of their religion? Can the US bar entry and even citizenship for Muslims, as Trump has demanded? The very idea gives the ACLU and the left the vapors. Islamophobia is no different from racism in their eyes. Even those who are not religious still hesitate to say anything bad about “faith.” In this country, churches (and mosques) remain untaxed, and even the most egregious religious hucksters are free to fly wherever they want in tax-free multimillion-dollar jets. Religion is untouchable.

Unfortunately, Islam is different. Islamism (and Islamofascism) presents an existential threat to Europe and to Western values. For a long time, many “liberal” Europeans and European countries preferred to look away from problems with these immigrant populations. They ignored the increasing number of rapes committed by immigrant males against European women. They tried to explain away the groups of Muslims who insisted on blocking traffic while they prayed in the streets. They didn’t want to seem intolerant. They wanted to help these people. But over time, the clash of cultures and values finally became too intrusive for people to ignore. The “far right” parties arose over legitimate concerns about the failure of these new immigrants to even try to assimilate, and their attempts instead to impose their values on the host country that had welcomed them.

I haven’t looked into this carefully, but I don’t believe the far right in Europe reflects the same model of dark billionaire money cynically out to leverage anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim resentment to get tax breaks. Europe is far, far to the left of the US in social values and social programs. In France, Macron spurred outrage by even suggesting raising the retirement age to 64.

I think there’s an impulse, especially on the left, to see any reaction against immigrants as racist and prejudiced. We feel we must be tolerant towards all religions, no matter how intolerant and antithetical to our values they may be. On the left in particular, there is an underlying suspicion of Western values as being patriarchal and misogynistic. (As opposed to the benevolent and egalitarian values of Islamic countries.)

Even if immigrants do not pose a major threat to a country’s values (most of the non-Muslim immigrants in this country – Hispanic, European, or Asian – do not resent our values), sheer volume can be a problem. (And yes, many of the South American migrants are fleeing their countries at least in part because of the ways we screwed up their countries to begin with.) This has presented Democrats in particular with a very complicated issue to deal with since they are the party of tolerance and social safety nets. For them, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” is a mantra that embodies the most aspirational vision of who we are and who we want to be

For Republicans, immigration – especially illegal – was mainly about cheap farm labor and workers who could be cheated and abused and who would have no way to go to the authorities for help. Or, more recently, programmers from India who would work for half the wages of American programmers. For them, immigration is transactional. What’s in it for us, or more specifically, what’s in it for me?

The number of immigrants from Muslim countries in the US, however, has been increasing, and we are beginning to see the same kinds of problems in certain cities and areas here that Europe has been dealing with all this time. Those on the left have been quick to denounce “Islamophobia,” as if it were automatically a bad thing. I’m not so sure it is.

But it presents the left with another internal fight. Do we really want to accommodate people who do not share our values and have no intention of joining with us in good faith? Who are not liberal in any possible sense of the word?

For the “woke” left, the answer is unequivocally “Yes.” Campus protests over Gaza featured “feminist” women carrying signs proudly declaring, “We are Hamas,” a group of religious fanatics that would perform clitorectomies on them, and then consign them to burkas and tell them to stay indoors and shut the fuck up. And, of course, we have the “Queers for Palestine,” out to support a group whose members would immediately take them to the top of the nearest tall building and throw them off.

I know there are some very moderate Muslims, people who are as relaxed about their religion as most Protestants and Catholics are about theirs in this country. (Think of “Catholics for choice,” Catholics who work to support abortion rights.)

I’ve worked with Muslims in Dubai, and other than their multiple wives and their not drinking (and being part of a society that survives on the backs of indentured and abused labor from other countries), they seemed perfectly pleasant. Of course, Dubai’s economy depends on it being a center for international trade, which has only been made possible by adopting a level of tolerance not seen elsewhere in the Arab world. (And yes, it does cause problems.)

If I were in Europe, I would definitely be voting “far right.” And I think that if the Democrats don’t wake up, they’re going to lose a lot of people like me through ideological idiocy.