The National Review is on a Pim Fortuyn kick today. First, John O’Sullivan writes of the “combination of oversimplification and outright falsehood […] found in the media picture of an ‘extreme right’ resurgent throughout Europe.”
It is in reality a multitude of anti-establishment attitudes. The Danish ‘extreme right’ party, for instance, wants to protect its nation’s welfare state from the demographic pressures of high immigration. Le Pen may be an anti-Semite at heart, but his voters seek a crackdown on the high levels of crime, including attacks on Jews. Fortuyn wanted to preserve the ultra-tolerant liberalism of Holland (that allowed, among other things, his own recreational drug-taking and promiscuity) against the puritanism of the growing Muslim minority. And so on. None of these attitudes, however, is currently acceptable to European elites. Their articles of faith are that immigration is necessary and politically unavoidable, that opposition to Muslim immigration in particular is a far greater problem than the immigration itself, that nationalism is a backward and illiberal doctrine, and that the protest parties are simply expressions of racism and economic insecurity.
They cannot admit that human-rights liberalism and a genuine multiculturalism are incompatible and that some cultures, notably Islamic ones, reject major elements in the West’s concept of human rights — such as equality between the sexes. Underlying that inability is a failure to grasp that liberalism is itself a Western invention, or that it is part and parcel of the national identity of individual Western nations in subtly varying forms. The press treats all nationalism as incipient fascism, even though Fortuyn’s patriotism incorporated Holland’s tolerance of homosexuality, and a British patriot might be especially proud of the Royal Navy’s suppression of the slave trade.
In short, there are such things as liberal nationalisms and nationalist liberalisms — something incomprehensible to orthodox multicultural liberal opinion and thus increasingly dangerous to it.
Next, Rob Dreher — who’s been particularly tenacious (and instructive) with regard to the unfolding Fortuyn saga* — puts the whole LPF phenomenon into its proper “western” political context:
Of […] lasting significance, Fortuyn — a gay, nationalist free-marketeer — made it possible for the conformist Dutch polity to speak openly about their concerns regarding problems with immigrant populations. Before Fortuyn, it was nearly impossible to criticize the behavior dark-skinned immigrants in Dutch society, for fear of being denounced as a racist. ‘Those days are over,’ said a Haarlem voter. ‘We can’t go back.’
Why should American conservatives care about an election in a tiny country in northern Europe, one whose right wing is farther to the left than many Democrats?
First, these results, tracking as they do with political developments in other European countries, are a wake-up call for the statist Eurocratic establishment, which is increasingly out of touch with voters. Had Fortuyn not been murdered, he may well have been the country’s next prime minister. As it stands, the established parties will now have to be more responsive to the electorate, which is increasingly skeptical of their collusion in the transfer of national sovereignty to Brussels. Fortuyn’s moderate calls for a rollback of centralized state authority within Dutch borders were also highly significant, as was his extolling of individual responsibility.
Second, the Fortuyn phenomenon, which arose in one of the most liberal countries in Europe, signals that European voters may be willing to confront the serious problem their nations have with immigration and loss of national identity. With birth rates plummeting, Europe will have no choice but to reign in its welfare state, but it will also have to continue to accept immigrants. The Fortuyn vote signals that European voters are getting serious about both requiring and helping immigrants to assimilate.
Finally, NR’s editors argue that Fortuyn’s murder speaks to the sneering dismissal of conservative politics by the EU elites:
[Pim Fortuyn’s] death is the most lurid symbol of the vilification of conservative opinion in the brave new world of the EU. While it is often wrong to extrapolate from the deeds of lone gunmen, Fortuyn’s murderer may well have been politically motivated. Dutch police are holding a 32-year-old eco-activist — a man of the wild Left. The timing of Fortuyn’s murder, within a fortnight after the French presidential elections, was also suggestive. As all the world knew, Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the French run-off. Le Pen is a demagogue who has said deplorable things. But in a race that included a former Trotskyite (Lionel Jospin), as well as current Communists, of both the Third and Fourth Internationals, it was grotesque to treat him as a portent of the end-times. In Europe, radicals and totalitarians of the Left are part of the order of things, but the non-establishment Right is beyond the pale.
[…] Fortuyn, in most of his beliefs, was a lefty libertarian. He supported drug legalization and euthanasia, two popular Dutch nostrums; he was an ostentatiously out homosexual. But if one breaks ranks on immigration
2 Replies to “Fortuyn-ate Sons”
C’mon, would you really rather have a paedophile as a neighbor than a Muslim?
No.
Still doesn’t mean Fortuyn was wrong about immigration.