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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34921 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Far-right parties on the rise across Europe.

That's a headline we've all read many times in the past decade, is now really different? There are many clips around the internet of the race riots in France, with this Reddit thread showing a compilation of some. It's hard to gauge how serious the riots are, or if it's relatively isolated to a few blocks in a couple cities and these compilations make the situation appear worse than it actually is. The words of Eric Zemmour paint a dire picture:

We are in the early stages of a civil war. It’s an ethnic war. We can see clearly that it’s a race war. We see what forces are involved. We need someone determined and firm. … The problem, above all, is the number [of immigrants].

The reason I think the BBC article is noteworthy, most of all, is because it observes that contrary to the previous bouts of nationalistic populism that inspired Brexit and Euroskepticism, this surge in far-right political support seems to be dovetailing with support for the EU:

While at the same time, a number of far-right parties in Europe have intentionally moved more towards the political centre, hoping to entice more centrist voters.

Mark Leonard cites far-right relations with the EU as another example of their 'centrification'.

You may remember, after the UK's Brexit vote in 2016 that Brussels feared a domino effect - Frexit (France leaving the EU), Dexit (Denmark leaving the EU), Italexit (Italy leaving the EU) and more.

Many European countries had deeply Eurosceptic populist parties doing well at the time but over the years those parties have felt obliged to stop agitating to leave the EU or even its euro currency.

That seemed too radical for a lot of European voters...

Polls suggest the EU is more popular amongst Europeans at the moment than it has been for years.

And so far right parties now speak about reforming the EU, rather than leaving it. And they're predicted to perform strongly in next year's elections for the European parliament.

Paris-based Director of Institut Montaigne's Europe Programme Georgina Wright told me she believes the far-right renaissance in Europe is largely down to dissatisfaction with the political mainstream. Currently in Germany, 1 in 5 voters say they're unhappy with their coalition government, for example.

Wright said many voters in Europe are attracted by the outspokenness of parties on the far-right and there's tangible frustration that traditional politicians don't appear to have clear answers in 3 key areas of life:

  1. Issues linked to identity - a fear of open borders and an erosion of national identity and traditional values
  1. Economics - a rejection of globalisation and resentment that children and grandchildren aren't assured a better future
  1. Social justice - a feeling that national governments are not in control of the rules that govern the lives of citizens

I do not agree with Mark Leonard that far-right relations with the EU are an example of the centrification of the far-right, it rather represents a change in strategy.

I've seen it asked here, what would be the pathway for political or cultural victory of the radical right? This is it- these energies being transformed into a positive and ambitious political project that surfs the wave of globalization and European integration. In hindsight it seems like such a bad strategy for the far right to advocate stepping away from a project like this, and the failure of Brexit to produce any meaningful change is, along with Trumpism, proof of the failure of petty nationalistic populism. If you blame the EU for immigration you don't leave the EU, you go for European parliament.

Journalists have spent many years hand-wringing over the Euroskepticism being influenced by right-wing politics, but I think they will find the prospect of the EU being reformed by a pro-EU radical right to be much more worrisome- and effective at bringing real change.

Edit: Police Unions are also describing the situation as dire:

Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm doesn’t go far enough. It must be imposed.

Re-establishing order in the republic and putting those arrested somewhere they can do no harm must be the only political signals to send out.

Our colleagues, like the majority of the public, can no longer have the law laid down to them by a violent minority.

This is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these ‘vermin’. To submit, to capitulate, and to give them pleasure by laying down weapons are not solutions, given the gravity of the situation.

They said: “Today, police officers are at the frontline because we are at war.” And they warned the government that, unless officers are given yet greater legal protections and more resources in the future, “tomorrow, we will be in resistance”.

I think it’s a positive sign for the European far right, but a big part of the problem for them is what happens when they win. There isn’t really a plan for what to do with the banlieues. Repatriation still seems incomprehensibly beyond the pale, even Zemmour wouldn’t dare go beyond suggesting possibly deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners.

There's a whole raft of powerful policies waiting beyond the Overton Window, e.g., making eligibility for government benefits or government housing dependent on having at least 1 French grandparent. As long as one is willing to address the charge of "second-class citizenship" with 'yes, and so what?', then France can quickly make itself intolerable for its own immigrant underclass.

I’m not sure any of that it possible unless all of Europe does the same. Europe has free transit across borders, so immigrants can get citizenship at the easiest point, then cross borders until they end up in a rich European country. The US has the same problem— a state refusing immigrants would be forced to accept them because California does and the lack of borders between states means a sort of race to the bottom.

I’m not sure any of that it possible unless all of Europe does the same.

From the point of view of the European populist right, yeschad.jpg. The European Parliament effectively forces political movements to organise at a pan-EU level, and the populist right is getting better at it. The bottom-up movement to curtail Muslim immigration is inherently pan-EU.

Also, the problem as perceived by the marginal right-populist voter is irregular immigration, and a lot of work on that issue (border policing, asylum reform, doing deals with transit countries to push "refugees" back) can and should be done at EU level, and increasingly is. Contrary to the "woke EU" memes spread by the Brexit campaign, the EU institutions have proved themselves perfectly willing to actually do anti-immigrant things where the member states let them. The EU (largely under the influence of Eastern European conservatives) has produced

  • A public statement by the Commission President (effectively the head of the EU executive branch) that countries deliberately facilitating the transit of unwanted immigrants are engaged in a "hybrid attack" on the EU.

  • A uniformed EU border corps (Frontex). Frontex also has a coast guard that actually turn migrant boats round and send them back (see wokist wailing and gnashing of teeth), rather than acting as a water taxi service. This Samo Burja briefing (unfortunately behind an expensive paywall) provides confirmation that Frontex is for real from a non-establishment source.

  • The Dublin agreement to stop asylum shopping. (Leaving the Dublin agreement as a side effect of Brexit is why the UK now has a "small boat" immigration crisis that we didn't when we were in the EU)

  • A deal with Turkey to return Syrian refugees who settled in Turkey before illegally immigrating to Europe.

  • The only reason why the EU isn't funding border fences is tit-for-tat budget politics.

"If we want to keep the infidel out of Europe, we need to work together" has been a truism of European politics for almost 1000 years by now.

While in the US, the country will whiten over the medium-long term if immigration can be cut off, is that the case in France? I mean payments to ethnic French to have more babies probably won’t work, you’d have to rely on natively high fertility rates, and it seems like once you exclude the Muslims and tradcaths France has typical-euro fertility.

I believe, and I think a substantial portion of the right does as well, that the presence and resource cost imposition of all these immigrants is having a serious depressive effect on birthrates and family formation. The resources being used to subsidise the reproduction and immigration of all these new muslims are resources that are actually adding to the competition faced by ethnic natives who are in many cases generating these resource surpluses, not just being removed from them!. When I talk to people in western countries who would like to have children but are currently not, the manifestations of these costs loom extremely large in their mind. I actually think that the impact of diversity in this regard is even more pernicious than just the numbers would suggest - does it really seem plausible that events like the Rotherham cases had no impact on the life-trajectory and family formation of the individuals involved?

If you break it down further, the white Republican TFR is replacement, while the native black TFR is much lower than the overall black TFR, and the Hispanic TFR is mostly declining. So over the long term assuming no immigration, the red tribe expands demographically while other groups shrink, which looks like a whitening country. The non-white groups having a higher TFR is mostly due to 1st gen immigrants.

Also, when hispanics assimilate they tend to do so into the red tribe- so they identify as white once they’re white passing.

All true, but a key component is net "conversion" from red tribe to blue tribe. The size of red tribe whites is shrinking as some portion of their children become blue tribers and move to cities. The rural stock of conservative whites doesn't have sufficiently high fertility to offset this drain. Red-tribe whites are at about 2.0 TFR and blue-tribe whites are 1.3. This assimilation dynamic means there is no rebounding effect on overall white TFR unless the acculturation/assimilation dynamic stops or reverses.

I see little chance of that happening at present.

The red tribe seems to be slowly getting better at dealing with the assimilation effect, and in any case the assimilation of Hispanics is probably able to at least partially offset it.

Remember that pickup trucks and country music are booming businesses, and that’s probably the best vibes based indicator of the relative strength of red tribe cultural power.

That would mean changing the constitution, since it would create two classes of citizen. That’s kind of the problem for them, under the law almost all the rioters etc are citizens.

I mean we’re on the fifth republic already. It’s not hard to imagine a sixth.

There's a lot of superstructure now that is intended to prevent further such changeovers...

Make revocation of citizenship for crime relatively easy?

I hear far-right commentators excited about revocation of citizenship as if it's the easiest thing when it actually seems like the hardest and most fraught option. Even without the concrete issue of venerable and widely respected international agreements specifically against it, producing an appreciable number of stateless individuals - especially a particularly criminal and undesirable sample of stateless individuals - would be seen as shitting on the international commons. It's not like people on your territory would magically disappear if you revoke their citizenship, and so all you would actually be doing - assuming you don't keep them firmly locked up yourself after revoking their citizenship - is that you would be telling other countries that you will refuse to take responsibility for them or take them back if they somehow make their way into those countries. Doing this would quickly turn you into a pariah state in a way in which no amount of concentration camps, draconian laws or firing squads, targeted against your own, would.

I understand some proponents' attitude towards that would amount to a "so what, sending a big fuck you to the rest of the world is a feature, not a bug"/"if everyone hates us that means more jobs for our people and military", but it seems that many others instead subscribe to a fantasy where if France revokes the citizenship of an nth-generation criminal African then after much wailing and gnashing of teeth some African country nobody can point out on a map will step up and admit that the individual in question is actually theirs (or perhaps that they can run a country-level paternity test that will identify some Equatorial Guinea as on the hook for child support in best reality TV fashion).

International agreements of the 'humanitarian' kind only matter to western nations in any meaningful sense. If they go far right, and it would only take two of the big ones, I don't think anyone will care enough or afford to uphold them.

To that end there would be no problem with France sorting the good from the bad in their society, relegating the bad to some purpose built prison hole in Djibouti.

The point is that it's only superficially about humanitarianism and actually largely about forswearing a type of aggression between roughly equal nation-states that is annoying to defend against.

Who is going to operate the prison hole in Djibouti you are talking about? The Djiboutians would neither be efficient nor incentivised to keep the people in, and would demand a lot of money for it if their internal politics don't randomly whiplash against operating it for any price; for the French running a prison in Djibouti - assuming they can rent the land or muscle themselves into it, which is not so clear - might turn out more expensive than running the same prison in France. (I haven't looked up the operational costs, direct and indirect, of Guantanamo Bay which seems to be the closest equivalent of what you are proposing, but I doubt it's cheaper than your run-of-the-mill federal supermax.)

If the humanitarianism is superficial then what problem are we facing? By the sound of things many on the far right in Europe are not against the EU per se. I don't see why, if we're not maintaining some facade of treating native first worlders and foreign third worlders the same, that the sky will fall as a consequence. European nations can continue working together despite that.

As for Djibouti, the French already have a military base there. Which they could run with an additional prison complex for as cheap as the French can run things overseas given they have the French Foreign Legion stationed there. It would be much less Guantanamo Bay and much more refugee camp you can't leave.

But that's kind of besides the point. I'm not attached to any one mechanism for doing things like that. I mentioned it more in passing than anything. The third world manages to house their criminals. I don't see the task as being impossible or even that hard for France. Nor why it would end up being prohibitively expensive.

If France had third worlders with no land to call home that commit crime, ship 'em out to prisonland.

Yeah, people also don’t realize just how much many people don’t want to go ‘home’. You’re not going to move to the Ivory Coast or Mali even if stripped of welfare rights. Mild pressure wouldn’t do it.

The UK did recently strip the citizenship of a woman (who joined ISIS) on the basis that she was entitled by ancestry to Bangladeshi citizenship, leaving her arguably stateless in a refugee camp. But doing it on a large scale would be quite different.

It presents a concrete political objective. A pan-European radical right movement to reform the EU constitution to actually serve European people would have to aim high and dream big.

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