Sebastian Kurz's People's Party Wins Parliamentary Elections in Austria - UPDATED!

At the Guardian U.K., "Conservative Sebastian Kurz on track to become Austria’s next leader: Centre of political gravity shifts right as projections put 31-year-old Kurz’s Austrian People’s party ahead in election with 31.7%."

And at WaPo, "Austria turns sharply to the right in an election shaped by immigration":

Early exit polls of Austria's Oct. 15 election, suggest Sebastian Kurz, will take his party into a very narrow majority — positioning himself as the next chancellor. The 31-year old conservative is known for his pledge to take the country into a more hard line stance against the influx of refugees and migrants.

BERLIN — Austria became the latest European country to take a sharp turn right on Sunday, with the conservative People’s Party riding a hard-line position on immigration to victory in national elections and likely to form a government with a nationalist party that has long advocated for an even tougher stance.

The result puts the 31-year-old foreign minister and People’s Party leader, Sebastian Kurz, in line to become Austria’s next chancellor after a campaign in which he emphasized the need to strengthen border controls, reduce caps on refugees and slash benefits for newcomers.

Much of Kurz’s rhetoric echoed positions long held by the Freedom Party, which for decades has anchored the far right of politics in this nation of 8.7 million.

With nearly all results counted as of Monday morning, the Freedom Party was in second place at 27.4 percent, with the ruling Social Democrats trailing close behind at 26.7 percent. The People’s Party was the decisive winner, at 31.6 percent.

“I’ll fight with all my strength for change in this country,” Kurz told cheering supporters — many clad in turquoise, the color he adopted to signal a new era for the People’s Party after decades of identification with black. “There’s a lot to do.”

Two years after Austria was among the more welcoming nations in Europe for refugees fleeing en masse across the continent, the results revealed just how sour public sentiment has turned. Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war, oppression and poverty passed through the central European nation on their way to destinations farther north and west in late 2015 and early 2016. Tens of thousands stayed in the country and applied for asylum protection.

“Austrians are fearful because of immigration and the refugee crisis,” said Reinhard Heinisch, a political scientist at the University of Salzburg. “Kurz addressed these fears, and played with these fears.”

As in other elections across Europe this year, the far right made significant progress, but not enough to triumph.

In France this spring, National Front leader Marine Le Pen made it to the final round of the presidential election. Just last month, the Alternative for Germany Party took 13 percent of the vote — putting a far-right party in the German Parliament for the first time in more than half a century.

But unlike in those nations, in Austria the far right is expected to become part of the government. Kurz will need a coalition partner to form a majority in the parliament, and the Freedom Party is considered the most likely option.

If he goes that route, it would end a “grand coalition” between Austria’s center left and center right that has led the country for the past decade, and for much of its modern history.

Some on Sunday called on Kurz to avoid teaming up with the Freedom Party...

A lot of good that'll do. Kurz himself is a former neo-Nazi, according to Sunday's report at the New York Times. I don't care for anyone with that kind of background and I denounce them. But I think it's just deserts for the radical left, who opened up Europe to the Muslim invasion, and thus opened up the European democracies to a resurgence of nativist, even racist, political parties.

More.

UPDATE: Correction, it's not Kurz who belonged to neo-Nazi groups previously, but Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, which came in second in Sunday's election and is likely to enter the government in a coalition with Kurz's People's Party.

Lesson From Iraq: Difficulty is No Cause for Hypercaution

Former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson has a new column up at Newsweek on the lessons to be learned from Iraq. In the opening paragraph he states an obvious point: Regime change is difficult. But he makes a more substantial argument with his case against excessive caution:

There is also danger in learning the wrong lessons from Iraq—or in overlearning the lessons of caution. Some claim the American project in Iraq was doomed from the beginning, because Iraqis and Arabs more broadly are culturally incapable of sustaining democracy. That is a familiar historical charge, made in other periods, against Catholics in Southern Europe, Hindus and Muslims in India, Eastern Orthodox in Eastern Europe, and Confucian cultures across Asia. All of these groups experienced difficult days in their democratic transitions—moments when the skeptics seemed to be vindicated. Did Indian democracy look to be successful when more than a million people died by violence during the partition process in the later 1940s? But in all of these cases, betting against the advance of democracy was a poor wager.

It may be possible that the Arab world is the great exception to this trend of history; but if so, Iraq does not prove it. Americans who first entered Iraq did not report an inevitable sectarian conflict. To the contrary, the Shia were remarkably patient during the first two years after the liberation. Iraqis of every background, including most Sunnis, were pleased that Saddam was gone and were generally inclined to withhold judgment about the occupation. There was little resentment at the size of the occupation force, and great hope that the arrival of the Americans would improve the lives of the Iraqi people. Nor were the successive elections an illusion. They were real achievements. Iraqis voted under considerable threat, in percentages greater than do Western democracies—advances that should not be forgotten or denigrated.

Given these events, an imperious contempt for the Shia—a belief that barbarians will always be barbarians—is neither fair nor helpful. Iraqi patience and goodwill were not lacking; rather, they were squandered when the Coalition failed to provide security and basic services. Sectarian conflict was not preordained—it intensified when many of the Shia lost confidence in the ability of the Coalition and Iraqi army to defend them and turned for protection and revenge to militias and death squads. Iraq does not demonstrate that democracy is impossible in the Arab world; it demonstrates that founding a new democracy is difficult in a nation overrun by militias and insurgents.

This is not to say that support for democracy in the Arab world always requires immediate elections. Such elections in Saudi Arabia, for example, would likely result in a government more oppressive and dangerous than the current one. But in Iraq there was no alternative to elections. After the invasion and liberation—undertaken, it bears repeating, primarily for reasons of national security—the president was not about to install a potential Shia dictator in place of the old Sunni dictator. That kind of cynical power game would likely have facilitated a massive Shia retribution and perhaps even genocide against the Sunnis. Democracy is necessary in Iraq precisely because it is the only political system that eventually can tame sectarian tensions, giving the Shia majority the influence it deserves, while guaranteeing the rights and representation of the Sunni minority.

But democracy in Iraq certainly has enemies—jihadists, Baathist holdouts, and religious militias—who happen to be some of the worst criminals on the global stage. We have been led by history to a simple choice: do we stand with the flawed democrats of Iraq, or abandon them to overthrow and death? Some foreign-policy realists argue that such considerations of honor mean little in international affairs. But this national commitment is more than a matter of chivalry. If America abandons Muslim leaders and soldiers who are risking their lives to fight Islamic radicalism and terror—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—the War on Terror cannot be won.

Another false lesson is found in the assertion that the Iraq War has actually been creating the terrorist threat we seek to fight—stirring up a hornet's nest of understandable grievances in the Arab world. In fact, radical Islamist networks have never lacked for historical provocations. When Osama bin Laden proclaimed his 1998 fatwa justifying the murder of Americans, he used the excuse of President Clinton's sanctions and air strikes against Iraq—what he called a policy of "continuing aggression against the Iraqi people." He talked of the "devastation" caused by "horrible massacres" of the 1991 Gulf War. All this took place before the invasion of Iraq was even contemplated—and it was enough to result in the murder of nearly three thousand Americans on 9/11. Islamic radicals will seize on any excuse in their campaign of recruitment and incitement. If it were not Iraq, it would be the latest "crime" of Israel, or the situation in East Timor, or cartoons in a Dutch newspaper, or statements by the pope. The well of outrage is bottomless. The list of demands—from the overthrow of moderate Arab governments to the reconquest of Spain—is endless.

America is not responsible for the existence of Islamist ideology. Yet the shifting prospect of American success or failure in the Iraq War does have an effect on the recruitment of radicals. All "pan movements"—political ideologies that claim historical inevitability—expand or contract based on morale. Bin Laden talks of how the Arab world is attracted to the "strong horse"—the victor, the evident winner—and there is truth in that claim. In an ideological struggle, perception matters greatly, and outcomes matter most. Israel's perceived defeat in Lebanon in 1982 helped produce a generation of terrorists, convinced that armed struggle could humble their enemy. If America were really to retreat in humiliation from Iraq, Islamist radicals would trumpet their victory from North Africa to the islands of the Philippines … increase their recruitment of the angry and misguided … and expand the size and boldness of their attacks.

Perhaps the most dangerous and self-destructive lesson that might be drawn from Iraq is a hyper-caution indistinguishable from paralysis. In a backlash to the Iraq War, some Democrats seem to argue that any future American action or intervention will require both certainty as to the validity of our intelligence and international unanimity. The evidence on weapons of mass destruction must always be conclusive, or else it must always be mocked and dismissed. The United Nations must always grant its blessing and legitimacy. Were America to accept these ground rules, we would become a spectator in world events. The demand for intelligence certainty would allow flickering threats to become raging fires before any action were taken to extinguish them. The demand for international unanimity would make interventions to prevent genocide or ethnic cleansing nearly impossible. America acted in the former Yugoslavia under President Clinton without U.N. support, and may need to do the same in other places in the future. At some point, caution becomes demoralization, and humility becomes humiliation.

That's most of his piece, actually. His new book, from which this excerpt is drawn, might be worth a good look as well.

Alternative for Germany Party Gains Ground Ahead of Elections

Hmm.

At Der Spiegel, "Normalization on the Extreme Right":

The far-right Alternative for Germany party is polling better than it has in several years. With elections approaching next year in a trio of eastern German states, the AfD is seeking to find its way even closer to the political mainstream.

The world wars, says Tino Chrupalla, head of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), were "a catastrophe" for Germany and Europe. They "divided the continent and weakened it permanently."

Chrupalla speaks of Germany’s "defeats." He doesn’t, however, speak of the millions of dead, nor does he make mention of the Holocaust.

Instead, Chrupalla says that he finds it problematic "to always link remembrance with the question of guilt." Culpability issues should be "superseded by the question of the accomplishments of every civilization." That, he says, is a process the AfD would like to initiate. "Historical guilt should no longer determine the way we act."

Those who may still have been wondering where the AfD stands on the political spectrum and what to think of the party’s leader – who is fond of referring to himself as a mainstream conservative – such utterances should make it abundantly clear. The quotes come from an interview Chrupalla gave to the right-wing extremist blog "Sezession," which appeared two weeks ago – right around the time when the rest of Europe was observing Victory in Europe Day.

Chrupalla’s comments are reminiscent of the rather shocking claims of his predecessor Alexander Gauland, who is today honorary chairman of the AfD. In 2018, Gauland said that Germany had a "glorious history that is much longer than 12 years." And: "Dear friends, Hitler and the Nazis are but a spot of bird shit on German history."

Five years ago, Gauland’s statements triggered widespread indignation. Leading politicians from all of Germany’s democratic parties condemned his comments, the German government branded them as "shameful" and all major media outlets covered the story. There were even voices within the AfD itself demanding an apology, which Gauland then half-heartedly delivered. He regrets the impact they made, he said.

But following Chrupalla’s comments? Crickets. There were no objections worthy of note from his own party nor from other politicians – despite the fact that Chrupalla went even further than Gauland. Gauland at least mentioned the Nazis. Chrupalla, though, did not, nor did he say anything about their crimes.

Getting Used to the Party

The incident shows once again just how entrenched the AfD has become, how the party has become an accepted part of Germany’s political landscape. Ten years after its founding, so many have grown used to the party and its beliefs that not even historical revisionism is sufficient to trigger a debate. Instead, other parties have begun cooperating with the AfD time and again, particularly the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), which is part of Germany’s current governing coalition.

Despite being monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on suspicions of right-wing extremism, the AfD doesn’t just have representatives in almost all of Germany’s state parliaments and in the Bundestag, the federal parliament in Berlin. It is also polling higher in public opinion surveys than it has in five years. A broad feeling of uneasiness with the current situation could be feeding the rise, as could the fact that the number of refugees arriving in Europe has once again ticked upwards. But are such explanations sufficient?

Keep reading. 

The Radical Left's Massive Resistance

The radical left has declared war on the Trump administration, and by extension, all decent Americans.

At FrontPage Magazine, "The 'Resistance' Democrats are a Terrorist Party":

The Democrats have committed to overthrowing our government.

What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government.

In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done.

This time around it’s “radically” different.

The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is “Resistance.” Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President Trump will be brought down. There is fevered speculation about the 25th Amendment, a coup or impeachment due to whatever scandal has been manufactured last.

This fantasy is part clickbait. Leftist media outlets are feeding the worst impulses of their readers. But there is a bigger and more disturbing radical endgame.

The left can be roughly divided into moderates and radicals. The distinction doesn’t refer to outcome; both want very similar totalitarian societies with very little personal freedom and a great deal of government control. Instead it’s about the tactics that they use to get to that totalitarian system.

 The “moderates” believe in working from within the system to transform the country into a leftist tyranny. The “radicals” believe that the system is so bad that it cannot even be employed for progressive ends. Instead it needs to be discredited and overthrown by radicalizing a revolutionary base.

Radicals radicalize moderates by discrediting the system they want to be a part of. Where moderates seek to impose a false consensus from within the system, radicals attack the system through violent protests and terrorism. Their goal is to set off a chain of confrontations that make it impossible to maintain civil society and polarize the backlash and chaos into consolidating the left for total war.

That is what “Resistance” actually means.

A similar program implemented in Europe, with a covert alliance between Communists and Nazis, led to the deaths of millions, the destruction of much of Europe and the temporary triumph of the left.

The radical left’s efforts in America caused death and destruction but, despite the sympathy of many liberals for terrorist groups such as the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, failed to escalate because the majority of Democrats and even liberals did not accept the premise that our system was illegitimate.

That began to change this century.

64% of Democrats insisted that President Bush had not been legitimately elected. 49% declared that he was not a legitimate president. 22% vowed never to accept him no matter what he might do.

After 9/11, over half of Democrats believed that Bush had known about or been involved in the attacks.

Anywhere from two-thirds to a quarter of the Democrats rejected the results of a presidential election, rejected the president and suspected him of conspiring to murder thousands of Americans.

The left was winning. Much of its natural “moderate” base viewed our government as illegitimate.

The left has declared that President Trump’s victory is illegitimate. The response is “Resistance.” That covers violent anti-government protesters, states declaring that they are no longer bound to follow Federal immigration law and Senators obstructing for the sake of obstruction.

It’s easy to get lost in the partisan turmoil of the moment, but it’s important to understand the implications. If two presidential elections were illegitimate, then our entire system of elections might be illegitimate. And indeed the left made exactly that case with its attack on the Electoral College.

The left pressed Dems to oppose President Trump for the sake of opposition. The goal wasn’t just spite. It was to break the government. When the left forced Senate Dems to filibuster President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, the filibuster became the first casualty of the fight. The goal of the radicals was to make bipartisan legislative activity impossible. Senate Democrats adopted the position of the radical left that their mission was wrecking institutions to deny them to Republicans rather than governing.

Once that was done, the radical left could unveil arguments such as, “The United States Senate is a Failed Institution”. Much like our system of elections and every other part of our government.

The radical left’s goal is to convince its natural base that our system of government is illegitimate. It knows that this can’t be limited to the theoretical level of ideology. Instead it must radicalize by demonstrating it. It does not seriously believe that President Trump will be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or any other aspect of the system. Instead it is feeding these fantasies so that when they fall through those on the left who believed in them will be further radicalized by their failure.

And Democrats have become complicit in the radical left’s program to bring down the government.

They have normalized the radical leftist position that our system is illegitimate. They have moved into the second phase of the left’s program of demonstrating that illegitimacy through confrontation. The final phase is to overthrow the system through actions ranging from protests to terrorism.

This is Cloward-Piven institutional sabotage on a whole other scale. The goal is to collapse our entire system of government. And the Democrats have climbed on board with it using President Trump as a pretext. But regardless of which Republican had won, the end result would have been the same.

The left makes its opposition to the Constitution, the election process and the rule of law into a crisis. And then it uses that crisis to demand a new system. It has pursued this approach successfully in local areas and in narrower causes. This is not the first time that it has embarked on such a project on the national level. But this is the first time that it has the full support of a major national political party.

And that is the true crisis that we face.

The left’s endgame is a totalitarian state. Its “moderates” pursue one by peaceful means only so long as they are allowed to hijack the system. When an election fails to go their way, the radicals brandish it as proof that the system has failed and that violent revolution is the only answer.

But what was once the obscure behavior of a deranged political fringe has become the mainstream politics of the Democrats. The Resistance theme shows that the radicals have won. The Democrats haven’t just fallen to the left. They have fallen to the radical left which believes in overthrowing our system of government through conflict and confrontation rather than covertly engineering change.

The Democrats have become a terrorist party. And their commitment to a radical revolution has plunged our political system into chaos. The left is now exactly where it wanted to be.

And a civil war has begun...

Still more.

UKIP's Political Earthquake

At Blazing Cat Fur, "'The most extraordinary result in 100 years': Farage hails UKIP triumph as Labour and the Tories are humiliated."

And from Enza Ferreri, at Frontpage Magazine, "‘Earthquake’ in the U.K.":

“An earthquake” is how the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) described what happened Thursday May 22 when all Britain voted to elect its share of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and various parts of the country voted to elect local councils.

While the results of the Euro Elections were not announced until Sunday to wait for the results of the whole European Union, where some countries voted later, the local election results were known immediately, and were pretty much as Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, described them: an earthquake. In a country with a three-main-party system (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats), the UKIP became firmly established as the fourth party. It didn’t gain overall control of any local council, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Labour won 338 more councillors than it previously had, the Conservatives were down 231 councillors, the Liberal Democrats took a bashing losing 307, as many as 40 percent of their councillors, and UKIP went from two to an astonishing 163 councillors, turning from a fringe, tiny party into a serious contender for government.

But it was last night, at the European Elections, that UKIP got a real triumph. Not only did it top the polls with more votes than all other parties for the first time in its history, but its victory also marked the first time in which a nationally-held election has not been won by either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party since 1906.

This historical event upsets all the current paradigms of British politics. For a start, it makes it much more difficult to predict future election results, including the 2015 general elections for the British Parliament, the “real” polls that will decide who’s going to govern the UK.

A three-party system is easier to understand and forecast than a four-party one. Without UKIP, Labour might have been cast as the next British government, benefiting from the dissatisfaction from the supposed “cuts” and “austerity” measures that the present coalition of Tories and Lib Dems in government had to enforce to heal at least in part the ruinously irresponsible economy and welfare policies of the past Labour administration.  Something similar happened in other parts of Europe, hence the BBC’s headline, “Eurosceptic ‘earthquake’ rocks EU elections,” in reference to the parallel result of Marine Le Pen’s Front National which won a record victory in France.

Back in the UK, the Liberal Democrats were almost wiped out from the European Parliament, being left with just one MEP of the 11 they previously had. This is Catherine Zena Bearder, standing in the South East, the largest region in the UK, where my party, one-year-old Liberty GB, got 2494 votes.  These results show a clear shift in public opinion towards a decidedly anti-immigration, anti-European-Union stance.  The reaction of the (previously) three main parties and of the liberal media is interesting because it shows that they simply don’t get it.

They cling to justifications, rationalizations, excuses, pedantic nitpicking, like “it hasn’t been an earthquake because UKIP has no control of a single council” or “it’s just a temporary protest vote. They’ll come back to us.”

Also at London's Daily Mail, "'We're coming for YOU, Red Ed': Farage boasts there is no limit to UKIP's ambitions as he reveals plan to go after Miliband's Doncaster seat in the wake of Euro triumph."

Worries in Euro Zone Shift to Italy From Spain

Well, I'm not surprised at all.

At the New York Times, "Worry for Italy Quickly Replaces Relief for Spain":

VENICE — Concerns grew on Monday that Italy could be the next victim of Europe’s financial infection, leading nervous investors to sell Italian stocks and bonds and damping euphoria over a weekend deal to bail out Spain’s banks.

Italian officials privately expressed concern that the 100 billion euros, or $125 billion, that Europe pledged to Spanish banks might not stop the troubles from spreading.

Italy’s main stock index was Europe’s worst performer on Monday, a day when United States stocks were also dragged down and investors flocked yet again to the safe harbor of American and German government bonds. Even the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, a European technocrat who came to office after the euro crisis forced out Silvio Berlusconi last November, has begun to acknowledge the dangers posed to his country’s 1.56-trillion-euro economy ($1.95 trillion).

The main fear is that Italy cannot grow its way out of a recession fast enough to pay a mountainous national debt. Other concerns include the fact that Italy, with the third-largest euro zone economy after those of Germany and France, will have to shoulder a large portion of the bailout bill even as it grapples with its own sharp economic downturn.

Because Italy does not have enough economic growth to generate the money itself, the government will probably have to borrow it at high interest rates, adding to an already heavy debt load.

“There is a permanent risk of contagion,” Mr. Monti told an economics conference near Venice over the weekend, speaking by telephone. “That is why strengthening the euro zone is of collective interest.”

Prices of Italy’s government bonds reached their lowest level in months. Investors apparently found little assurance that the euro currency union was any closer to solving its underlying problems — not with parliamentary elections in Greece this weekend that could determine whether the currency union is strong enough to retain its weakest members.

Investor euphoria in Europe over the Spanish bailout deal Monday morning was short-lived, giving way to an essentially flat day on many European stock markets. But Italy’s benchmark index was the Continent’s worst performer, ending down 2.8 percent.

Continue reading.

Geert Wilders Convicted of 'Hate Speech'

Well, perhaps Mr. Wilders might move here, after the new Trump regime comes to power. He'll have a nice welcome compared to "old Europe," the hateful Europe of far-left political correctness and oppression.

At the Guardian U.K., "Geert Wilders found guilty of inciting discrimination" (via Memeorandum).

And at Pamela's, "Islam in Europe: Freedom party’s Dutch MP Geert Wilders CONVICTED of heresy, WILDERS’ STATEMENT":

Freedom party leader Geert Wilders has been convicted of hate speech today in the Netherlands.

I have long known, admired and worked with Geert Wilders. I brought him to CPAC back in 2009. He spoke at our Ground Zero Mosque protests in 2010. He is one of the world’s foremost fighters in defense of liberty, a modern-day Churchill. He is a towering figure, iconic of the fight in defense of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. We oppose jihad and sharia.

The unending persecution of Wilders is the byproduct of Islam in Europe. Today he was found guilty of discrimination — hate speech — in other words, violating the speech laws under the sharia (Islamic law).

I predict this will backfire and Geert Wilders will go on to be elected Prime Minister in the next election.

Here is Geert Wilders’ response to his conviction:

Dear friends, I still cannot believe it, but I have just been convicted. Because I asked a question about Moroccans. While the day before yesterday, scores of Moroccan asylum-seekers terrorized buses in Emmen and did not even had to pay a fine, a politician who asks a question about fewer Moroccans is sentenced.

The Netherlands have become a sick country. And I have a message for the judges who convicted me: You have restricted the freedom of speech of millions of Dutch and hence convicted everyone. No one trusts you anymore. But fortunately, truth and liberty are stronger than you. And so am I.

I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me. And you are wrong, too. Moroccans are not a race, and people who criticize Moroccans are not racists. I am not a racist and neither are my voters. This sentence proves that you judges are completely out of touch.

And I have also a message for Prime Minister Rutte and the rest of the multicultural elite: You will not succeed in silencing me and defeating the PVV. Support for the Party for Freedom is stronger than ever, and keeps growing every day. The Dutch want their country back and cherish their freedom. It will not be possible to put the genie of positive change back in the bottle.

And to people at home I say: Freedom of speech is our pride. And this will remain so. For centuries, we Dutch have been speaking the unvarnished truth. Free speech is our most important possession. We will never let them take away our freedom of speech. Because the flame of freedom burns within us and cannot be extinguished.

Millions of Dutch are sick and tired of political correctness. Sick and tired of the elite which only cares about itself and ignores the ordinary Dutchman. And sells out our country. People no longer feel represented by all these disconnected politicians, judges and journalists, who have been harming our people for so long, and make our country weaker instead of stronger.

But I will keep fighting for you, and I tell all of you: thank you so much. Thank you so much for all your support. It is really overwhelming; I am immensely grateful to you. Thanks to your massive and heartfelt support, I know that I am not alone. That you back me, and are with me, and unwaveringly stand for freedom of expression.

Today, I was convicted in a political trial, which, shortly before the elections, attempts to neutralize the leader of the largest and most popular opposition party. But they will not succeed. Not even with this verdict. Because I speak on behalf of millions of Dutch. And the Netherlands are entitled to politicians who speak the truth, and honestly address the problems with Moroccans. Politicians who will not let themselves be silenced. Not even by the judges. And you can count on it: I will never be silent.

And this conviction only makes me stronger. This is a shameful sentence, which, of course, I will appeal. But I can tell you, I am now more vigorous than ever. And I know: together, we aim for victory.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, we are strong enough to change the Netherlands.

To allow our children to grow up in a country they can be proud of.
In a Netherlands where we are allowed to say again what we think.
Where everybody can safely walk the streets again.
Where we are in charge of our own country again.

And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.

There's video at the link.

PHOTO: "Faith, Freedom, and Memory: Report From Ground Zero, September 11, 2010."

BONUS: "Geert Wilders' Right to Speak."

Rotten in Denmark: 'Growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy...'

Get a kick out of this, from Hugh Eakin, at the New York Review of Books, "Liberal, Harsh Denmark":

In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters have brought to power a right-wing party whose leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and “various types of parasites” to Europe. In France’s regional elections in December, some Socialist candidates withdrew at the last minute to support the conservatives and prevent the far-right National Front from winning. Even Germany, which took in more than a million asylum-seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of North African origin.

And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of 5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation. Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost its entire Jewish population.

When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable. In last June’s Danish national election—months before the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe—the debate centered around whether the incumbent, center-left Social Democrats or their challengers, the center-right Liberal Party, were tougher on asylum-seekers. The main victor was the Danish People’s Party, a populist, openly anti-immigration party, which drew 21 percent of the vote, its best performance ever. Its founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, for years known for suggesting that Muslims “are at a lower stage of civilization,” is now speaker of the Danish parliament. With the backing of the Danish People’s Party, the center-right Liberals formed a minority government that has taken one of the hardest lines on refugees of any European nation...

Leftists are constantly spewing about how great Scandinavian countries like Denmark are, claiming that their social welfare-state economies are superior to the U.S., blah blah.

Heh, not so much when it comes to Muslim "refugees" though.

Keep reading.

Paris Attacks, Rise of Islamic State, Shake a Weakened Europe — And the International System

A great piece, from Robert Kagan, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Crisis of World Order":

The only alternative [to European and Obama-led global chaos] is to address the crisis in Syria and Iraq, and with it the terrorist threat posed by Islamic State. But just as in the 1990s, when Europeans could address the crisis in the Balkans only with the U.S. playing the dominant military role, so again America will have to take the lead, provide the troops, supply the bulk of the air power and pull together those willing and able to join the effort.

What would such an effort look like? First, it would require establishing a safe zone in Syria, providing the millions of would-be refugees still in the country a place to stay and the hundreds of thousands who have fled to Europe a place to which to return. To establish such a zone, American military officials estimate, would require not only U.S. air power but ground forces numbering up to 30,000. Once the safe zone was established, many of those troops could be replaced by forces from Europe, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but the initial force would have to be largely American.

In addition, a further 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops would be required to uproot Islamic State from the haven it has created in Syria and to help local forces uproot it in Iraq. Many of those troops could then be replaced by NATO and other international forces to hold the territory and provide a safe zone for rebuilding the areas shattered by Islamic State rule.

At the same time, an internationally negotiated and blessed process of transition in Syria should take place, ushering the bloodstained Mr. Assad from power and establishing a new provisional government to hold nationwide elections. The heretofore immovable Mr. Assad would face an entirely new set of military facts on the ground, with the Syrian opposition now backed by U.S. forces and air power, the Syrian air force grounded and Russian bombing halted. Throughout the transition period, and probably beyond even the first rounds of elections, an international peacekeeping force—made up of French, Turkish, American and other NATO forces as well as Arab troops—would have to remain in Syria until a reasonable level of stability, security and inter-sectarian trust was achieved...

RTWT.

Greece Still Wants Free Lunch

At the Wall Street Journal, "Greece Votes Again" (via Google):

Nobody said the second time would be the charm. Greece's political parties failed to form a government after last month's parliamentary elections, and neither Greek citizens nor their creditors have any appetite for another inconclusive result after Sunday's runoff vote. But no number of polls will spell political stability for Greece unless Athens can show the credible commitment to reform that the Greek establishment has dodged for decades.

Not that too much in the way of reform is on offer at ballot boxes this weekend. The question after Sunday will be whether either of the two main parties can deliver Greece from the clientelism and corruption that bloat its government and leave its private economy moribund—even if they manage to form a government that can serve out the year.

Ahead of the election, the center-right New Democracy party looks to be leading the Coalition of the Radical Left—Syriza in the Greek abbreviation. But once again no party is likely to claim an absolute majority. Syriza was the sleeper story of last month's elections, winning second place with 16.8% of the vote; the party took less than 5% three years ago.

Syriza's ascent has given officials in Brussels and Berlin more than a few sleepless nights. Alexis Tsipras, the party's fiery 37-year-old leader, vows that he'll tear up the EU-IMF bailout agreement but keep Greece within the euro zone. If he becomes Prime Minister, has said he'd nationalize Greek banks, halt privatizations, reverse pension and wage cuts, and scrap the current pledge to fire 150,000 government workers.

But equally worrisome is the centrist parties' collapse into irrelevance. New Democracy chief Antonis Samaras has made the right noises about tax freezes and structural reforms, but if his party wins first place on Sunday it would likely have to form a coalition with Pasok, the socialist party that won third place in May. A joint government with Pasok and one of the smaller parties would be encumbered by coalition politics and peopled by many of the same officials who swelled Greece's public debt and turned "Greek accounting" into an international punchline.

Any government that is formed after Sunday will have to move carefully or face swift collapse. Mr. Tsipras thinks Angela Merkel is bluffing when she says she'll cancel Greece's funding if Athens cancels the bailout terms. He says the German Chancellor and other EU leaders are too committed to keeping Greece in the euro zone not to make concessions....

We hope the Greeks sort it all out, and that the Acropolis doesn't get destroyed in the process. But at one level the politics is a sideshow to the central lesson of Greece's crisis. For decades, and especially once they joined the euro zone, Greeks borrowed to consume beyond their means, and in 2009 the bill came due.

On Sunday Greeks try again to decide on the means of repayment: Mr. Samaras is offering to swallow the austerity medicine but seems fated to under-deliver on the restructuring that needs to accompany it. Mr. Tsipras is promising a free lunch. A Syriza victory Sunday would suggest that millions of Greeks still believe in no-cost dining.

That this is where Greece has come should give EU policy makers pause. Spanish banks are being bailed out and a deeper transfer union looms, but Greece shows that there are limits to what rescue money can achieve when it is poured into a broken political system.

The larger question raised by the current state of Greek politics is whether more transfers and more fiscal union can make Greece and the rest of Europe more like Germany. Or will they make European politics more like Greece's?

RELATED: At the Australian, "Greek leftist Alexis Tsipras slams 'Merkel's Europe' as election looms."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Greece voters face tough choices at polls: The upcoming vote is seen as a referendum on Greece's Eurozone membership." And the New York Times, "Europe Braces for Greek Vote — and Maybe More."

Dutch Election Sows (Shows) Extreme Political Fragmentation

From Cas Muddle, an excellent scholar, at NYT:

MY take on Dutch elections. Headline by @nytimes doesn't really summarize different points made in it. #TK17 🇳🇱 https://t.co/9ZmoHAC936

— Cas Mudde (@CasMudde) March 16, 2017

The parliamentary election in the Netherlands on Wednesday was predicted to be the next populist show of strength after the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election. The Dutch would be the first of a number of European countries to succumb to the right-wing populists’ siren songs in 2017, with the French not far behind.

It didn’t work out that way.

Geert Wilders, who is all too often described as a bleach blond or referred to as “the Dutch Trump,” did not defeat the conservative prime minister, Mark Rutte. In fact, he didn’t come close.

With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or V.V.D., came first with 21.2 percent of the vote, compared to Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom, which took only 13.1 percent. Mr. Wilders barely improved on his margin in the 2012 election (where he took 10.1 percent) and failed to do as well as he did in 2010 (where he got 15.5 percent of the vote).

The real story in Dutch politics isn’t Mr. Wilders’s rise, it is the unprecedented fragmentation of the political system. Together, Mr. Rutte’s and Mr. Wilders’s parties look set to make up only 33 percent of the Parliament, with 11 more political parties constituting the rest. This splintering of Dutch politics is making effective governance of the country increasingly impossible.

While previous Parliaments have counted 14 or more factions, what has changed is the relative size of the parties. In 1986, the top three parties together won 85 percent of the vote. In 2003, it was down to 74 percent. Today it is just around 45 percent.

Because of its proportional representation system of voting, the Netherlands is an extreme case. But the trends are similar across Western Europe: The main center-right and center-left parties are shrinking, smaller parties are growing and unstable coalition politics are becoming the norm. There are many reasons for this — from secularization to deindustrialization to the emergence of new political issues, like the environment or immigration.

The consequences have been painfully visible across Europe for some time. It took Belgium 541 days to form a government after its 2010 election. Both Greece and Spain were in recent years forced to hold second elections after the first Parliaments failed to form coalitions. In the Netherlands, forming a government is not quite as difficult, but the next one will most likely be a coalition of four to six parties.

If the Party for Freedom is excluded — and almost all parties have pledged that they will refuse to serve in a coalition with Mr. Wilders — the government will probably consist of five or six medium-size parties that span almost the entire political spectrum. Given that the conservative V.V.D. and the Christian Democratic Appeal are ideologically closer to the Party for Freedom than they are to, for example, the Green Left party with which they will be governing, the government will be rightly perceived as an anti-Wilders coalition.

This will play right into Mr. Wilders’s hands. He has long argued that the Netherlands’ political parties are all the same. Being the leader of the largest opposition party against an internally divided, weak “anti-Wilders” coalition is undoubtedly his second most desired outcome of the elections — after, of course, winning an outright majority of the votes.

The only way to break this vicious circle is for the parties in government to come together to support a positive program, one that justifies their cooperation and their decision to exclude Mr. Wilders...

Double Blow to Germany's Leadership

At the Wall Street Journal, "Victory Shuffles European Politics":

BERLIN—For five years, Europe’s common-currency bloc has squabbled over whether the solution to its economic crisis lies in slimming the state and deregulating markets, or in more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.

The battle lines just got messier, the way out even less clear.

Since the start of the eurozone’s debt crisis, the bloc’s wealthier countries—led by Germany—have largely prevailed in pushing economic overhauls, not stimulus, as the main way to nurse indebted nations to financial health. Now, eurozone voters are in open revolt against such fiscal strictures, while the European Central Bank just overthrew German monetary orthodoxy.

Sunday’s historic victory for the radical left-wing Syriza party in Greece’s elections is likely to embolden populist movements in other eurozone countries, including Spain, France and Italy, which reject German-sponsored austerity.

Their growth on both the left and right of Europe’s political spectrum suggests the breadth and complexity of voter discontent. Spain’s far-left Podemos party has surged in opinion polls, and elections are due late this year. France’s far-right National Front is roiling the country’s establishment with attacks on austerity as well as immigration. Italy’s populist, euroskeptic Five Star Movement wants to renegotiate the national debt.

Greece is the most extreme example of the fraying of support for the mainstream center-right and center-left parties that have dominated Western European politics for decades. The antiestablishment surge comes amid the Continent’s longest economic slump since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile the ECB’s decision on Thursday to buy eurozone government bonds and other assets to stimulate growth and inflation broke with Germany’s deeply held belief that central banks shouldn’t print money to buy public debt.

The ECB used to back Germany loudly on the benefits of austerity, before suggesting last fall that the eurozone overall had become too austere and that Germany should spend more. Lately, ECB head Mario Draghi has avoided provoking Berlin on fiscal policy while also antagonizing it with his bond-buying program.

The bank and Berlin agree on one thing: the need for market-friendly overhauls to make eurozone economies more flexible. Yet those overhauls are harder than ever to sell to voters.

The three-way standoff between Germany, the ECB, and angry voters in Southern Europe is likely to resonate throughout 2015 in the eurozone, which lags behind the rest of the world in recovering from the global financial crisis...

More.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader, Is Dead at 91

One of the biggest, most important leaders of the second half of the 20th century. He wrought monumental change, literally bringing about the end of the post-WWII Cold War era.

At the New York Times, "Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.":

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.

At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.

For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not. It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.

But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Mr. Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir V. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For Mr. Putin — and his fellow K.G.B. veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia — the end of the U.S.S.R. was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo.

“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” A friend of his, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview that Mr. Gorbachev was “upset” about the war, viewing it as having undermined “his life’s work.”

When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.

A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.

The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.

The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Mr. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.

It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.

The openness Mr. Gorbachev sought — what came to be known as glasnost — and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him. Still, Mr. Gorbachev’s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:

■ He presided over an arms agreement with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons, and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.

■ He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.

■ While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.

■ He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform that in many places drove stunned Communist leaders out of office.

■ He permitted the release of the confined dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

■ He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.

■ In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom-of-conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to “satisfy their spiritual needs.”

But if Mr. Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world — he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 — he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Mr. Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.

After five years of Mr. Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Mr. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.

Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: “We see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.”

A Son of Peasants

There was little in his early life that would have led anyone to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev could become such a dynamic leader. His official biography, issued after he became the new party chief, traced the well-traveled path of a good, loyal Communist.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, a farming village in the Stavropol region of the Caucasus. His parents were genuine peasants, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. During his infancy, the forced collectivization of the land turned a once-fertile region into “a famine disaster area,” the exiled writer and biologist Zhores A. Medvedev wrote in a biography of Mr. Gorbachev.

“The death from starvation was very high,” he added. “In some villages, all the children between the ages of 1 and 2 died.”

Misha, as Mikhail was known, was a bright-eyed youngster whose early photographs show him in a Cossack’s fur hat. He grew up in a house of straw held together with mud and manure and with no indoor plumbing. But his family was well respected among the Communist faithful. Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his book “Memoirs” that both his grandfathers had been arrested for crimes against the Czarist state.

Still, the family’s embrace of Soviet ideology was not all-encompassing; Mr. Gorbachev’s mother and grandmother had him baptized...

Still more.

 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban Endorses Donald Trump

Heh.

Trump's better for Europe.

At WSJ, "Hungarian Prime Minister Expresses Support for Donald Trump":

BUDAPEST—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Saturday expressed support for U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, citing Mr. Trump’s views on fighting terrorism.

Mr. Orban said Mr. Trump’s proposals for the U.S. would also help Europe solve its security issues in wake of recent terrorist attacks.

The European Union’s current political leadership has failed and should undergo a major revamp to stem the rising fear and insecurity among the European people, Mr. Orban said in Baile Tusnad, a town in Romania’s Transylvania region, which has a large number of ethnic Hungarians.

The Hungarian premier’s annual Baile Tusnad speech gained international interest in 2014, when he rejected liberalism and expressed admiration for “illiberal democracies,” listing Turkey or Russia, among other countries.

Since Mr. Orban came into power with a landslide victory in the 2010 general elections, the Obama administration has criticized Hungary several times for alleged state corruption, failure to observe freedom of religion and shortcomings in following the rule of law.


“The EU is incapable of defending its own citizens, its own external borders, unable to hold together its community—as reflected in the exit of the United Kingdom. What else is needed to state that Europe’s current political leadership has failed?” Mr. Orban said.

The U.K. voted in a referendum last month to leave the bloc...

More.

Danish People's Party Wins Nearly 27 Percent of Vote in European Parliament Elections

That's Morten Messerschmidt of the DDP at the clip.

And this is especially interesting for Denmark, which is the quintessential European social welfare state.

And at the Guardian UK, "Far-right takes victory in Danish European elections."

And at Telegraph UK, "EU election 2014: Danish eurosceptic People's Party wins - and calls for alliance with Cameron":

The eurosceptic wave that swept across the continent engulfed Denmark on Sunday night, as the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party topped the polls at the European election.

The DPP, which had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark, won 26.7 per cent of the vote – and doubled its number of MEPs from two to four.

The result means that Ukip, France's Front National, and the DPP are the three biggest eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament. But the DPP - like Ukip - has repeatedly distanced itself from Marine Le Pen's FN – and on Sunday night announced that they were seeking an alliance with David Cameron's party.

"We want as much influence as possible in order to pull Europe in another direction, namely in the British direction," said Morten Messerschmidt, the leading DPP candidate. He said Mr Cameron and Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, were potential partners.

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "UKIP's Political Earthquake," and "National Front Smashes French Establishment in European Parliament Elections."

A Democratic Electoral Revolution?

Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos fame, has a new essay up at Newsweek, "We Say We Want A Revolution":

On Nov. 4, Barack Obama will be elected as the next president of the United States. The real excitement won't come from watching that foregone conclusion come to pass. No, the big question is, will Democrats nationwide simply "win" the night—or will they deliver an electoral drubbing so thorough that it signals the utter rejection of conservative ideology and kills the notion that America is a "center-right" country?

The theme of the essay is a kinder, gentler version of a series of Kos posts with the recurring message of "Break Their Backs," which includes this menacing tone:

This isn't about winning. It's about destroying the conservative movement, and their dangerous incompetence has given us an historic opportunity to deliver a killing blow.

Destroying? Killing?

This man's not nice, which is why I'm glad that this year - in the event of an Obama election - will represent a temporary diversion from the longer-term foundations of the nation as the very center-right polity that Moultisas so detests.

Notice how Kos saves his demonizing language for the mouth-foaming partisans at his blog (not Newsweek readers). There's good reason for that: Most Americans do not abide by the kind of rank polarization and demonization that is standard fare among the far left-wing netroots.

Indeed, in the event of an Obama presidency, the Democrats will need to find a way to suppress the most radical elements of their coalition, so as not to alienate the broader electorate, which is generally conservative, as Jon Meacham explains:

It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency....

But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that "the majority is to govern" has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

The pattern has deep roots. FDR had a longish run (from 1933 to 1937), but he lost significant ground in the 1938 midterm elections and again in the largely forgotten wartime midterms of 1942. After he defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964, LBJ had only two years of great success (Ronald Reagan won the California governorship in 1966) before Vietnam, and the white backlash helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Jimmy Carter lasted only a term, and Bill Clinton's Democrats were crushed in the 1994 elections. The subsequent success of his presidency had as much to do with reforming welfare and managing the prosperity of the technology boom as it did with advancing traditional Democratic causes.

Republican presidents, too, are frequently pulled from the right to the center....

So are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label. "Is this a center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's obviously much more conservative," says Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" and Washington bureau chief of the London-based Economist. "There's a much higher tolerance for inequality, much greater cultural conservatism, a higher incarceration rate, legalized handguns and greater distrust of the state."

This "tolerance for inequality" and distrust of the state" - as well as all the other elements of American conservatism - are exactly the foundations of American society that the Kos revolution hopes to overturn. In foreign affairs, the Kosocrats seek the destruction of Israel and Kos himself said he wanted to see American private contractors in Iraq dead and on the cover of every newspaper in the country.

I'm convinced that Kos and his netroots-brethren are radically out of the mainstream of American society.

More importantly, I'm convinced that Barack Obama - who has welcomed the support and has even openly cooperated with Daily Kos - is also well outside the mainstream of the American political culture, and an Obama administration will push an extreme-liberal policy agenda of tax hikes, spending windfalls, economic stimulus, spread-the-wealth redistributionism, universal health care, infrastructure investment, fairness doctrine, global warming legislation, restrictions on gun rights, abortion on demand, embryonic stem cells, foreign importation of prescription drugs, union card-check voting, trade protectionism, precipitous Iraq withdrawal, ban on domestic wiretapping, opposition to mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, sex-education for kindergartners, race-based affirmative action, expanded welfare entitlements, radical education pedagogy, and enemy appeasement diplomacy with no preconditions (and more).

This is a policy agenda not of the America I know, and come the revolution, I'll be relentlessly fighting in resistance to the Kospierre-Obama program of domestic and internationalism radical-leftism.

Never Heard of Sam Kriss, But His Takedown of the Left's 'Russia Hacked the Election and Gave Us Donald Trump' Meme is the Best

I really don't get where the "game theory" part is coming in here, which is apparently what this dude Eric Garland, who went on a Twitter rant about Russian meddling in the election, argued.

But the response from this Sam Kriss dude is the best ever:

It’s possible that the Democratic National Committee leaks were caused by Russian hackers—but given that the hack took place thanks to John Podesta clicking on a link in a phishing email, displaying all the technological savvy of someone’s aunt extremely excited by the new iPhone she thinks she’s won, it could have been anyone. The “leaked” CIA concerns over Russian meddling were quite clearly leaked deliberately by the CIA itself, an organization not exactly famed for its commitment to the truth; they’re the conclusions of an investigation that hasn’t even happened yet and on which there’s no consensus even among the gang of petty Caligulas that calls itself the intelligence community. Still, it’s possible. Countries sometimes try to exert influence in each other’s internal affairs; it’s part of great-power politics, and it’s been happening for a very long time. When Americans meddled in Russia’s elections, it was by securing victory for Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s very own Donald Trump, a man who had sent in tanks to shell his own parliament. Leaked cables suggest that Hillary Clinton’s own State Department interfered with the political process in Haiti by suppressing a rise in the minimum wage. And American involvement in the politics of Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran was mostly through military coups, sponsored by none other than the CIA. There was no question of these countries repeating their elections; anyone the generals didn’t like was tortured to death. Next to the mountain of corpses produced by America’s history of fixing foreign elections, a few hacked emails are entirely insignificant.

Whatever Russia did or didn’t do, the idea that its interference is what cost Hillary Clinton the election is utterly ludicrous and absolutely false. What cost Hillary Clinton the election can be summed up by a single line from Sen. Chuck Schumer, soon to be the country’s highest-ranking Democrat: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” As it turned out, he was fatally wrong. It wasn’t the Russians who told the Democratic Party to abandon the working-class people of all races who used to form its electoral base. It wasn’t the Russians who decided to run a presidential campaign that offered people nothing but blackmail—“vote for us or Dangerous Donald wins.” The Russians didn’t come up with awful tin-eared catchphrases like “I’m with her” or “America is already great.” The Russians never ordered the DNC to run one of the most widely despised people in the country, simply because she thought it was her turn. The Democrats did that all by themselves.

What the Russia obsession represents is a massive ethical failure on the part of American liberals. People really will suffer under President Trump—women, queer people, Muslims, poor people of every stripe. But so many in the centrist establishment don’t seem to care. They’re far too busy weaving themselves into intricate geopolitical power plays that don’t really exist, searching for a narrative that exonerates them from having let this happen, to do anything like real political work. They won’t accept that Trumpism is America, in all its blood-splattered horror—that the dry civics lesson of a democracy they love so much is capable of creating a monster. Decades of neoliberal policy disenfranchised people to the extent that Donald Trump could look like a savior; far better to just hide your bad conscience somewhere far away in Eastern Europe. It wasn’t us, it wasn’t our country, we were all duped by Putin. And if this means falling into reactionary paranoia, screaming red-faced about traitors and spies, slobbering embarrassingly over the incoherent rants of any two-bit con artist whose name isn’t Donald Trump—so be it. None of this will help anyone or achieve anything, but that’s not the point. And then, at the end, with nothing solved, they shrug at us like Eric Garland’s imagined game-theory version of Hillary Clinton. Jesus, what can you do?

Jeez, that wasn't hard, now was it?

Dutch Elections Today

Following-up from last night, "Immigration Fatigue Defines Dutch Elections."

And after the Dutch elections on March 15, 2017

I Will Make The Netherlands Great Again!#MakeTheNetherlandsGreatAgain pic.twitter.com/rZXo1QpOy0

— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) November 6, 2016

.@BlazingCatFur Dutch Vote Watched Across Europe With a Finger in the Wind. https://t.co/X4huwf0rhg

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 15, 2017

In less than 24 hours, Dutch voters head to the polls. Here's where the race stands now https://t.co/J2kNtCMYVj pic.twitter.com/asKQa62gzS

— Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) March 14, 2017

Fascism vs. Right-Wing Populism

Sheri Berman is an excellent political scientist. I like her work a lot. But in two recent pieces on the surge in populism she can't resolve some key inconsistencies in her writing. The main thing is (1) she wants to argue Donald Trump (and right-wing populists in Europe) are not fascist, but (2) this same surging "right-wing [populist] extremism," in Berman's terminology, is still a threat to democracy.

I don't think you can have it both ways. For Berman, if the structural variables that were present in the Interwar period in Europe --- countries in physical ruin after WWI, extreme economic crisis, including the Great Depression, the breakdown of traditional hierarchy, especially aristocracy, absent the consolidation of democratic regimes --- were present today, we'd see the return of fascism.

She doesn't say in so many words, though. She only goes so far as to say that Trump and European "right-wing extremists" threaten current democratic norms and should be challenged, lest they threaten the democratic order.

See for example, Berman's piece from the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs, "Populism Is Not Fascism," and especially the conclusion:

The best way to ensure that the [Marine] Le Pens and Trumps of the world go down in history as also-rans rather than as real threats is to make democratic institutions, parties, and politicians more responsive to the needs of all citizens. In the United States, for example, rising inequality, stagnating wages, deteriorating communities, congressional gridlock, and the flow of big money to campaigns have played a bigger role in fueling support for Trump than his purported charisma or the supposed authoritarian leanings of his supporters. Tackling those problems would no doubt help prevent the rise of the next Trump.

History also shows that conservatives should be particularly wary of embracing right-wing populists. Mainstream Republicans who make bogus claims about voter fraud, rigged elections, and the questionable patriotism and nationality of President Barack Obama in order to appeal to the extremist fringes are playing an extremely dangerous game, since such rhetoric fans citizens’ fear and distrust of their politicians and institutions, thus undermining their faith in democracy itself. And just like their interwar counter­parts, these conservatives are also likely enhancing the appeal of politicians who have little loyalty to the conservatives’ own policies, constituencies, or institutions.

Right-wing populism—indeed, populism of any kind—is a symptom of democracy in trouble; fascism and other revolutionary movements are the consequence of democracy in crisis. But if governments do not do more to address the many social and economic problems the United States and Europe currently face, if mainstream politicians and parties don’t do a better job reaching out to all citizens, and if conservatives continue to fan fear and turn a blind eye to extremism, then the West could quickly find itself moving from the former to the latter.

Actually, democracy is not in trouble.

Donald Trump is not an "also-ran" but the president-elect who will take office as the 45th president of the U.S. on January 20th.

Berman's problem, I would argue, is that she sees populist rejection of left-wing policies as threats to democracy. They are not.

Her other piece, which specifies the nature of fascism much better than at Foreign Affairs, is at Vox, "Donald Trump isn’t a fascist."

The always excellent Sheri Berman: Trump is a right-wing populist, not a fascist. https://t.co/CyQgOcBQcH

— Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) January 3, 2017

It's good, but like I said, Berman fails to persuasively explain why so called "extreme" right-wing populist movements threaten democracy.

These movements, at least in the U.S., don't even threaten democratic norms, and her examples (like Trump's rejection of intelligence findings on Russian hacking) aren't in fact cases of deviations from such norms. And of course, the same things that Berman claims right-wing populist are doing, like rejecting election results, are exactly what Democrats and leftists have done since the election. So, why aren't far-left movements, socialism, neo-communism, and anti-neo-liberalism, in fact threats to democracy? The reason is that leftists have double-standards, and for them threats to democratic norms are only seen when populists reject leftist policies.

Until Berman and others can offer an even-handed argument for fascism vs. right-wing populism (or left-wing populism, for that matter), their commentary and research will be rejected as nothing more than partisan hackery.

Socialist Party Wins Majority in French Parliament

The New York Times reports, "President’s Socialist Party Wins Clear Majority in France."

And at Telegraph UK, "France election: Francois Hollande and Socialists head for absolute majority":

President François Hollande received a powerful mandate to champion growth in Europe and take on the German-led austerity drive last night as his Socialist Party headed for control of parliament with an absolute majority.

French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault welcomed the victory of his Socialist Party in legislative elections, saying:"The goal is to shift Europe towards growth and protect the euro zone from speculation. The task before us is immense".

After gaining control of the Senate and the presidency, the Socialists now wield more national power than ever before and the outcome means that Mr Hollande is unlikely to make major changes to his largely social democratic cabinet.

But the result of the election, marred by record low turnout of 44 per cent, is likely to mark the end of Mr Hollande's honeymoon period as he faces the economic realities of a debt-ridden Europe and domestic unemployment of 10 per cent, a 13-year high.

He clinched the presidential election in May in part by warning that his conservative rival Nicolas Sarkozy had erred towards too much belt-tightening and calling for more state-sponsored stimulus to boost growth.

But with Spanish banks just given a new bail-out and Greece's future in the euro in doubt, some commentators warn France could be next for market turmoil unless it makes deeper structural reforms.

Mr Hollande's first wake-up call could be the release of a public finance audit late June expected to show France must slow spending promises to meet its deficit goals.

His stance has put him on collision course with Germany in recent days, with Chancellor Angela Merkel pointing out that France risked further falling behind economically with his policies.

Well, it's going to be interesting, to say the least.

Check back for continuing coverage.