Despite What the Media Says, Common Sense and Cultural Self-Defense Is Not ‘Fascism’

‘Fascism’ as used by the Left simply means any opinion they disagree with. Remember, the Commies called SDs 'social fascists' in the 1930s.

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

These populist parties are rising in popularity because the established parties of both left and right have sold out the interests of their peoples.

If you are an American who depends on the U.S. and other English-language media for news about continental European politics—and most Americans obviously do—then you might well be afraid that a wave of fascism is poised to sweep Europe.

The European Conservative, obviously, is a great source of news and information about Europe for our American readers—and I hope with this column to help American conservatives better understand what’s going on with the European Right—because there are very few venues for them to do so.

American and British news agencies are reporting that the ‘far-right’ party VOX is likely to do well in this weekend’s Spanish elections. The ‘far-right’ Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is surging in German opinion polls. It seems like just yesterday that the “far-right” party of Giorgia Meloni topped Italian elections. ‘Far-right’ parties are key to governing coalitions in Finland and Sweden.

And, of course, the BBC website informs its readers to mind “the ultra-conservative, authoritarian-leaning governments in Poland and in Hungary.” Far-rightists to the fingertips, the lot, right?

Well, no. Not even close. American conservatives should understand that by U.S. standards, the ‘far-right’ parties are basically center-right contemporary Republicans. The declining establishment conservative parties of the European continent are more or less Clinton-style Democrats. There do exist genuinely far-right parties in Europe, but they aren’t anywhere near government.

(Though in this spring’s Hungarian elections, the actually far-right party Jobbik, which considers Viktor Orban to be a squish, went into coalition with the left-wing parties. This caused the coalition prime ministerial candidate to boast moronically that his side was truly diverse, because it spanned the ideological spectrum from communist to fascist.)

When U.S. journalists describe these nationalist and populist parties as ‘far-right,’ they intend to call up images of burly fascists marching down cobblestone streets in hobnail boots, shouting abuse at Jews and minorities. I can’t decide if they do this deliberately to mislead American readers into thinking Europe is two tics away from a gran mal Nazi seizure, or if the reporters themselves are so absorbed in the ideology of their class that they honestly cannot discern gradations of right-wing politics.

In 2019, the Columbia University academic and sometime-journalist Mark Lilla wrote a long, nuanced essay for the New York Review of Books, the leading journal of the liberal American intelligentsia, in which he explored a new current of right-wing French politics. It was socially conservative, ‘green,’ and tended strongly to attract Catholics. But these rightists were not tied either to the establishment French conservative party, or to Marine Le Pen’s National Front; rather, they were seeking a sort of crunchy-conservative third way. Lilla is no conservative, but his reporting was fair and insightful.

In the next issue, though, the magazine published an indignant letter from the Washington Post’s correspondent in Paris, who accused Lilla of whitewashing the far Right. It so happens that I knew what an appalling error in judgment this was by the Post’s man because I know personally some of the people Lilla profiled, and indeed the last time I was in Paris, had listened to them speak critically of neo-fascist elements on the right. Could it really be true that the reporter readers in the capital city of the American Empire depend on to tell them what’s going on in Paris might not know the difference between Hilaire Belloc and Heinrich Himmler?

An English friend who lives in Budapest with his Hungarian wife told me that since he relocated to Magyaropolis seven years ago, he routinely gets worried messages from pals back in Blighty who inquire about his safety. It’s not about crime (which, by the way, is much lower in the Hungarian capital than the British one). They have been reading, watching, and listening to British media tell them about the far-right hellhole that Hungary is, and can’t help worrying.

In the two years I’ve lived in Hungary, I have seen many Americans and Western Europeans come to Budapest for the first time, visibly anxious about what they’ll find, as they only know the city and the country from their media, which routinely denounce the Orban government as ‘authoritarian’ and, yes, ‘far-right.’ It only takes a few days for them to realize that they have been lied to, and that Viktor Orbán is the kind of reasonable, effective conservative that most Americans on the Right hope for when they vote Republican, but rarely get.

As I tell Americans headed over, “Budapest feels like a major midwestern American city, circa 1998.” If Clinton-era Omaha, but with better architecture and food, is your idea of Nazitown, maybe the problem is you.

To be fair, the nationalist, populist parties really are farther to the right than the established center-right, conservative parties like the Partido Popular in Spain, and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany. In a narrow sense, then, it isn’t inaccurate to call them ‘far right.’ But foreign correspondents surely understand that American readers don’t get the relative gradations of European politics. They read VOX described as ‘far right,’ and without context provided, will not know that the things the surging Spanish party stands for are things most U.S. conservatives would find perfectly normal.

For example, VOX is against abortion, critical of the wide expansion of LGBT rights, against open borders, and in favor of national sovereignty. This is ‘far right’? Of course, there should be a useful term to describe this kind of right-wing politics—’populist,’ perhaps, or ‘national-populist,’ perhaps even ‘national conservative’—but to fall back on the historically loaded signifier ‘far right’ is a slur and a distortion.

If you really see no distinction, for example, between Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, and the hard right policies of the opposition Jobbik and Mi Hazank parties—all of which are labeled equally ‘far right’ in the media—then you cannot be relied to be honest with your readers and viewers. As a journalist, you should think hard about whether or not you have lost touch with the world outside your social circles. And you should ponder whether or not you see your role as reporting the news, or rather trying to slander and demonize people whose politics you despise.

American conservatives scarcely have any idea how distorted European politics are by the media. Last year, Irene Montero, the Communist who heads up the ministry of equality (now there’s an Orwellian term!) in the Spanish government, said that children have a right to have sex if they consent. Note well: Montero is not a fringe member of the Podemos party, but a sitting minister, and the partner of Pablo Iglesias, a co-founder of Podemos who recently served as a deputy prime minister. Is the current Spanish government ever described as ‘far left’ in the mainstream media? If a Communist minister advocating for pederasty is not ‘far left,’ what is?

But hey, VOX are the ‘extremists.’ You see how this works.

By now, most American conservatives understand that to the mainstream U.S. media, anybody to the right of old-school moderate Republicans is on the ‘far right,’ because these journalists, in refusing to understand the country in which they live, judge the American political spectrum by the standards of Georgetown, Manhattan, and Los Angeles. As the populist parties of the Right make electoral gains in Europe, it’s vitally important for American conservative readers (and British ones as well) to get straight in their heads that in nearly all cases, these people are not extremists. They are, in the main, rather the long-repressed advocates of common sense and stability.

This week, two European liberal academics, Lorenzo Marsili and Fabrizio Tassanari, anticipating a turn away from the Soros-von der Leyen utopia espoused by Europe’s transnational ruling class, furrowed their brows and agonized over the “far-right” future emerging in Europe. They wrote on the website of Al Jazeera:

We always assumed that European unity would imply greater cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. But what if a united Europe turns out to build what Hans Kundnani calls an “ethnoregionalism”, or the appeal to the defence of a European “civilisation”?

Ultimately, the question is this: Could the far right leave behind its old-fashioned, petty nationalism and embrace new “European nationalism” that would further unite and strengthen the continent, even if at the cost of making it uglier?

Translation: Let us hope that if and when these deplorable people take power, they can be co-opted and neutralized by the establishment.

I certainly hope not. These populist parties are rising in popularity because the established parties of both left and right have sold out the interests of their peoples, in favor of a malign globalist vision that benefits the few at the expense of the many. It is one that reduces the power of self-rule, seeks to suppress religion, the traditional family, and speech that criticizes elite sacred cows, floods Europe with migrants, and, in the end, throws open the door to Europe’s civilizational suicide.

If ‘far-right’ comes to be seen by most European voters as a description of the kind of politicians who actually stand for defending European interests and traditional European values, then we will see a lot more of it, no matter what the elites say. The progressive dogs of the left-wing media and elite institutions may bark, but the caravan of common sense and cultural self-defense moves on.