Europe Is Exceptional, Worth Saving from Antidemocratic Immigration
Historian Mark Mazower’s recent essay on the implications of Donald Trump’s electoral victory for global democracy illustrates how academic and political elites continue to misunderstand the greatest political phenomenon of our times: Trump and the MAGA movement.
Mazower starts from the flawed premise that Europe has stronger democratic norms than the United States. His lens of what passes for democracy is determined in academic and policymaker circles in an antidemocratic and biased manner, as noted by Richard Hanania of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
The Treaty of Lisbon (2007) affirms that “every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen.” This assertion is demonstrably false.
It is widely recognized in academic circles that the European Union suffers from a democratic deficit. Its institutions and decision-making procedures lack democratic input and accountability. Mazower should have addressed the debate surrounding his basic premise.
The European Union does not guarantee free speech and openly targets social media under the guise of confronting so-called hate speech and misinformation. To the European Union, misinformation is basically just dissent from the prevailing orthodoxies on immigration, climate, gender, and abortion. Examples abound, in the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The absence of free speech also impinges on religious expression, as has happened in France. In the United Kingdom, members of parliament recently announced they planned to summon Elon Musk, owner of X, over supposed misinformation and hate speech on his platform.
Mazower cites French author and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand. He described the United States’ invention of representative republicanism as “the greatest political discovery” of modern times. It “resolved a problem that was thought to be insoluble”—the question of how millions of people could live together under democratic institutions.
Mazower laments that “American voters themselves this time around welcomed a program based around trade protectionism, immigration controls, and opposition to multiculturalism.” Mazower’s implication that the electorate was somehow morally deficient and ignorant in reelecting Trump revives the ill-founded arguments of another historian, Allan Lichtman. Lichtman explained away his failed election prediction with an astonishingly elitist take: blaming xenophobia and racism for his failure. Mazower’s account of the appeal of Trump and the 2024 elections is similarly off the mark.
Trump does not plan to start trade wars. Regardless of the economic merits of tariffs, the protectionism envisioned under the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act essentially responds to other countries’ ongoing unfair trade practices.
On immigration, Mazower glosses over the fact that Trump is responding to a catastrophic border crisis. After claiming the border was secure, Kamala Harris only admitted in October that border insecurity was a problem because she had to. The House Committee on Homeland Security reported in September that nationwide border encounters under the Biden-Harris administration exceeded 10.3 million, compared to just 3.1 million in the (FY) 2017–2020 period, roughly a 200 percent increase over the Trump presidency. These figures exclude the estimated 2 million known gotaways recorded by CBP since the start of FY21.
Trump’s positions on illegal immigration are popular. According to a CBS poll, a national program to deport all illegal immigrants records a 57 percent approval rate. His positions on immigration were considered mainstream not too long ago. In 2009, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the United States could not allow 500,000 people to pour over the border without control mechanisms in place. He further stated:
“to the undocumented workers … you’ve broken the law; you didn’t come here the way you were supposed to. So this is not going to be a free ride … you are going to pay a significant fine. You are going to learn English … you are going to go to the back of the line so that you don’t get ahead of somebody who was in Mexico City applying legally.”
In his 1995 State of the Union, President Bill Clinton declared:
“The jobs [illegal immigrants] hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use imposes burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
A rational immigration policy is hardly an illiberal idea. Economist Thomas Sowell has stated “we don’t have an immigration policy unless we control the border.” Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman argued that the free immigration model the United States had before 1914 was no longer viable under the modern welfare state: “it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs, it is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.”
Mazower fails to consider that rampant multiculturalism is itself a threat to democratic norms. Despite his praise for Europe’s lack of political polarization, Mazower fails to consider that uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism contribute nothing to the European consensus. Mazower ignores the social dangers posed by the massive influx of migrants whose sociocultural belief systems run afoul of every tenet of modern democratic life.
Long before Trump, European leaders recognized the failures of multiculturalism. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2010 said that multiculturalism had utterly failed. UK Prime Minister David Cameron said the same thing. Mazower would do well to remember the words of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in 2011 said:
“The truth is that, in all our democracies, we’ve been too concerned about the identity of the new arrivals and not enough about the identity of the country receiving them.”
As European society is being degraded due to the massive influx of unassimilable migrants with sociocultural norms unsuited for democracy, it would do the cause of democracy well to see a European version of MAGA. Mazower is right about one thing. Europe is exceptional and worth saving. A democratic effort to Make Europe Great Again might someday gain traction, before it is too late.
La opinión de este artículo es ajena a Noticiero El Vigilante
