Why the European Right keeps rising. By Ralph Schoellhammer at Brussels Signal.
What is rising across Europe …is …a recognition by an every growing number of citizens: That elections, in the form they have taken since the 1990s, have stopped producing the changes voters keep asking for….
Although the formal rituals continue — people going to the polls, watching the debates, not studying the party manifestos — all the substantive decisions most people see as existential priorities like migration and energy, are made elsewhere: At the European level, in supranational bodies, in NGO networks supported by public money, and in administrative organs accountable to nobody the voter can remove. The state, whose representatives often speak about “saving democracy” these days, actually likes this pattern. …
What is a nation?
A constitution does not produce loyalty. A welfare system does not produce solidarity. A passport does not produce belonging. These things are inherited from a cultural and historical substrate that liberal proceduralism takes for granted and that progressive politics actively dissolves.
When Robert Putnam published his study E Pluribus Unum in 2007, the finding that surprised even his sympathisers was that diversity reduces trust not only between groups but within them. People in heterogeneous communities trust their own neighbours less. Multiculturalism has failed on almost all accounts …
The European political class has chosen to interpret these findings as embarrassments to be managed rather than realities to be addressed. Habermas’s project of constitutional patriotism, the idea that a polity can be held together by rational adherence to legal procedure alone, was a brave attempt to construct a post-national basis for European politics. It has not worked, and the reason it has not worked is the reason no large polity in history has worked that way. Loyalty is not a contract.
Nationalism is stronger than mere economic self-interest:
It is closer to what Plato called thymos, the part of the soul that wants to be recognised and to belong to something larger than the calculation of personal advantage.
A politics that denies this desire does not abolish it. It only ensures that the desire will be channelled into parties that the political class would prefer did not exist.
Example, modern Germany:
People flock to the AfD not because they had it with democracy, but they actually want to save it.
Officially the firewall protects the constitutional order against extremism. In practice it functions as a guarantee that elections will not change the policies the established parties have already settled on. A coalition rightward of the centre is mathematically possible in several recent elections, in Germany and elsewhere (think Austria and France) but politically it has been ruled out in advance. Voters who supported the parties that, taken together, won a parliamentary majority discover that the policies enacted are the policies of the parliamentary minority.
This is an open conspiracy where the political class that has come to believe its current settlement is the end of history and that any serious challenge must be a pathology rather than a disagreement. You see, voting for the “far right” is not an expression of your political preferences, but shows that you are a despicable human being that should be barred from voting altogether.
Nazism — national socialism — was a fusion of communism and nationalism. It was dreamed up by communists returning from WW1, dismayed that the workers did not rise up against their capitalist masters — which confounded their expectations. The nationalism of the workers in the trenches was much stronger than their economic class consciousness. Lesson learned by Mussolini, and copied by Hitler.