The Netherlands' Lurch to the Right Has Lessons for Woke Democrats | Opinion

The winner of last week's Dutch election was Geert Wilders, one of Europe's most notorious immigrant-bashers. That capped a good week for populists, as Argentina also elected as president Javier Milei, another mutation of former President Donald Trump. The reason these things happened offers a lesson for the United States in 2024.

The lesson is that the Democrats will face disaster unless they correctly balance a need to mollify the progressive youth with a possibly greater need to not alienate everyone else with culture war positions obnoxious to most Americans.

What does that have to do with Holland? Well, let's take a look at Wilders, notorious for his peroxide hair and for being the bête-noir of Dutch politics for two decades.

His Party for Freedom (PVV in Dutch) basically stands for freedom from immigrants, and it won about a quarter of the vote on Nov. 22. That may not sound like much but it's way more than any other of the 15 parties that made it into parliament, and double his haul the last time around. The PVV is the largest in what can be called—despite a confusing landscape divided along many issues—a conservative majority.

So, Wilders, who can fairly be called the Dutch version of Trump, Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro, or France's perennial also-ran Marine le Pen, basically won the election. Only improbable (yet not impossible) alliances by incompatible other parties and splinters could deny him the prime minister's job. In a normal situation the result would make it a given.

Wilders' distrust of immigration has hit a nerve in the nation that gave backpackers from all corners of the world legalized pot, has shown a tolerance of misbehavior, and offers a notorious red light district.

Why?

Though the country is only 5 percent Muslim, the immigrants are increasingly visible in the large cities. Similar circumstances are sparking serious pushback in nearby Germany, Belgium, and France. And the reason why the Dutch are becoming illiberal about this is because they want to preserve their country as a liberal one.

We're talking about the global definition of liberalism, which is somewhat different from the American political one; it does not mean "far left" so much as a centrist focus on freedom, humanism, and individualism. The mass arrival of culturally conservative Muslims has sparked (along with old-fashioned racism) an epidemic of illiberalism from liberals concerned about the newcomers' illiberalism. It's an irony that merits scholarly attention (such as this paper from the Central European University).

In that vein, Wilders casts himself as a disciple of Pim Fortuyn, a fast-rising Dutch politician assassinated in 2002 by an opponent of his anti-Islam positions. Fortuyn, an openly gay former Marxist who rejected the far-right label, held those positions because he feared Muslim influence would make Holland unfriendly to gays.

Wilders feels the same, and has argued for closed borders and "zero asylum seekers." And while he has recently moderated his rhetoric, his party's manifesto calls for banning the Quran, Islamic schools, and mosques. He also wants to engineer a Dutch departure from the European Union, undeterred by the fiasco that Brexit turned out to be for Britain. That's mainly because EU membership forces Holland to welcome anyone allowed into other EU countries.

A hint at the reason for his ascent may be found in this recent poll that showed 51 percent of the Dutch either "negative" or "very negative" about immigration from outside the EU—which is a dog whistle for Muslim immigration.

It is a sentiment found all over Europe, including in France, where the xenophobic Le Pen—whose signature issue is immigration—has actually been leading in the polls.

Which brings us to the poor U.S. Democrats who once believed themselves destined to be the party of power because growing minority groups—Blacks and Hispanics—will forever vote for them in droves.

That idea was encapsulated by co-authors John Judis and Ruy Teixeira 21 years ago in "The Emerging Democratic Majority." This month the duo published another book—Where Have all the Democrats Gone?—claiming the potential was squandered by the party's excessive embrace of the progressives on cultural issues instead of core economic ones.

The Democrats remain aligned with the American majority on abortion, gun rights, health care, and the climate. While abortion has been an effective cudgel for them, the others have not; something is bothering the American people more. Among friends of mine inclined to vote Republican, it is indeed the culture wars.

The Democrats are being associated, in people's imagination at least, with an obsession with gender concerns and transgender rights, with an idea that racism is everything, and especially with opposition to policing the nation's borders.

It is interesting to note that even most Hispanic Americans agree that borders should be borders. It's almost as if they left Latin America because they wanted to leave Latin America. And deliciously absurd is the Latino community's refusal to rebrand themselves "LatinX," a term tone deaf non-Hispanics thought would offer the safest space for Spanish speakers.

U.S. minority communities are also, by and large, not enamored of gender politics or of "defunding the police." They want better and more police, since crime affects them disproportionately. Also, distressingly for the Democrats, they are not especially aligned with the indifference to religion that typifies the coastal elites.

Identity politics are tricky. On one hand many people love to celebrate their (generally unchosen) heritage. But on the other, an obsession with tribal and group identities is no way to foster a national one, and can render a society weak. We need an optimum of both, not a maximum of either.

Moreover, President Joe Biden is still hurt by the inflation that has bedeviled much of his time in office. Its that same issue (in a hyperinflation variant) that brought the government-despising Milei to power in Argentina. The masses, in North America as in the South, hate inflation most, because unlike unemployment, its effect is universal.

In the U.S., the Democrats have a strong case on core economic issues; it is clear to enough voters, including working-class whites, that the Reagan Revolution created outrageous inequality and did not benefit the middle class. It is easily provable that the Republicans are not the party of fiscal prudence they claim to be.

But for Democrats to win on culture wars they will have to await a future Gen Z majority, perhaps. Right now, less than a tenth of Americans identify as progressives—the moderate left is mostly liberal, and the two concepts are increasingly in opposition. Liberals are less likely to trivialize the scourge of racism (or antisemitism) by proclaiming it everywhere, and they reject the acceptance of all narratives as equally valid lived experiences.

In the wider sense, the global elites have made a fetish of "change," with worldviews no less than technology. But they forgot that people need to be persuaded that a given change is for the better. Absent that persuasion, people often like things as they are. Enough Dutch wanted Holland to be Holland as it was. Quite a few Americans, immigrants included, want America to be America as it was, or as they remember it. Unlike Holland, the U.S. is not a nation-state, but it still applies.

If the Democrats don't figure this out soon, it won't just be the Argentinian and Dutch Trumps who roll to power; for all his excruciating absurdities and despite the clear and present danger he presents, the original may do so, once again, as well.

Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.