TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN MY HEAD AND I, I WROTE ABOUT BOTH OF THEM
And Neither Had Anything To Do With Musk vs. Trump
Elon Musk vs Donald Trump is not why you read FRDH, First Rough Draft of History. You come for serious comment, not titillation and gossip, right? I only mention Musk vs. Trump in the title for SEO purposes.
Two stories of the past week have occupied my mind and this week’s newsletter is about trying to connect them up.
MAGA’s view of Europe, and this:
But let’s start with this Financial Times story from June 5th:
A few days before, as if to underline the ignorance required to “hate” a place so many Trump voters and their children like to take their vacations, there was this by Ross Douthat, full-time op-ed columnist of The New York Times
Doubt-that’s thesis is an old one on the American right, especially among those who wear their Christian faith on their sleeves (lest they misplace it and forget where and what it is):
Muslims, lots of them, have invaded the Christian citadel and are absolutely tearing a place called Europe apart bringing it to the brink of, as the headline says,
CIVIL WAR!!!!!!!!!!
And anyone who disagrees with this is
WOKE!!!!!!
Next month, London will mark the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 atrocity, when homegrown jihadis launched a coordinated suicide bombing attack on London’s public transport system. They killed themselves and 52 innocent people trying to get to work. 700 more were injured. If any event was going to ignite a civil war in Britain over MUSLIMS!!!! that would have been it. But it hasn’t happened.
Douthat’s piece doesn’t mention 7/7. It is primarily focused on France as the probable setting for Europe’s contemporary civil war. You don’t have to read very far into it before he invokes the novelist/agitator Michel Houellebecq as his expert witness. Houellebecq has become a wealthy man pushing this line. Islamophobia is a real political tool for the hard right. It has indeed been a help to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National or National Rally, the rebranded name of the Front National or National Front, the party she took over from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011.
As with all fascist parties, hatred is woven into National Rally’s DNA. When the elder Le Pen founded the National Front it was notorious for its anti-Semitism and Holocaust minimization (not outright denial, Le Pen acknowledged the Shoah took place but describes it as a mere “detail” of World War 2 history). Douthat wasn’t born in 1972 when the NF was set up but if he had had an Op-Ed column back then I don’t think he would have written Europe is facing Civil War over the continued presence of Jews.
The success of racist populists screaming about lots of MUSLIMS!!! does not mean Europe is on the brink of civil war, but writing about it when you are stuck for a subject as deadline approaches allows America’s right-wing “thought” leaders to deflect attention from the kleptocratic Trump regime they have to spend so much time making excuses for.
Still, it is right for the FT to ask “Why Does MAGA World Hate Europe?” given the comments of so many in the Trump cabinet about the continent and its trade association: the European Union. The answer to the question goes back much, much further in history than the MAGA phenomenon. I first heard rough criticism of Europe in mid-1990s Washington DC. It ran along the lines of Europeans are freeloading on America for their security via not paying for NATO. They use the money they saved on defense to build socialist systems that guarantee free (or nearly free) medical care to people and early retirements and all kinds of other “socialist” programs.
The origins of this attitude goes back even further, to at least the beginning of the 1980s, when Donald Trump was fighting his personal Vietnam, avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in swinging New York, and the Thatcher-Reagan era was just getting under way.
The sea change in America’s Republican Party and Britain’s Conservatives represented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher coming into office within a year of each other is easy to forget as the decades go by. The pair ended the post-Great Depression, post-War political-economic consensus that was based in regulatory banking safeguards and the state as the arbiter of fair competition.
They also brought the US and UK’s respective right-wing parties into close alignment that over time developed into an erotic entwining defined by an intellectual ecosystem of think-tanks and media cross-ownership — Rupert Murdoch, hello.
The contemporary Anglo-American right-wing has the same attitude and vocabulary to describe the world. From woke to cancel culture to Margaret Thatcher as patron saint.
Thatcher’s public face was the Iron Lady, implacably anti-Socialist and anti-Communist (she rhetorically made no distinction), player of the zero-sum, winner takes all politics beloved of Newt Gingrich and those who effectively turned the GOP into MAGA.
“You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning.”
But around the cabinet table Thatcher was a more traditional politician. Most of her cabinet were pro-Europe and because, in theory, the British government runs on cabinet consensus she remained very much pro the European Economic Community.
Throughout the 1980s, the growing dynamism of the EC as a trading bloc led to discussions of deeper integration. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the drive for closer European integration intensified. German re-unification and the creation of a Europe-wide currency, the Euro, were the focus. How do you administer such a currency? A new treasury department in Brussels, where the European Commission, administrative arm of the EC was located.
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François Mitterand were in favor of it. Thatcher wanted no part of it. She didn’t want to hand over any British sovereignty over treasury decisions and she didn’t trust either of her peers’ politics. Understandable in the case of Mitterand, he was a Socialist. The Christian Democrat Kohl was in theory a conservative but not of the red meat, Milton Friedman loving kind. And most important, the Commission was run by another French socialist, Jacques Delors.
In June 1989, just before elections to the European Parliament — a talking shop with very limited statutory powers — she told a Conservative rally in Nottingham
We haven't rolled back the frontiers of socialism in this country to see them re-imposed from Brussels.
18 months later she was defenestrated by her party, in part because of her increasing anti-Europeanism, in part because after 11 years in office she had become increasingly autocratic and had lost touch with the country. The polls had turned against her.
The fact that she had become incredibly unpopular was quickly forgotten, instead Britain’s aggressive right-wing press made her a martyr to Brussels’ socialism by stealth.
Two things happened in the aftermath of Thatcher’s “martyrdom”.
First, An anti-European Union political party, UKIP, was founded. Today, renamed Reform UK, it is led by Britain’s unofficial ambassador to MAGA, Nigel Farage, and it currently leads all British parties in opinion polls.
Second, Thatcher’s children came to power in 2010: David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Both had been at Oxford during Thatcher’s late glory years and become, if not euro-sceptic, euro-sanguine.
One of the pair’s Oxford friends was Michael Gove, today Lord Gove, editor of the Spectator, house organ of the British right.
All three of these sons of Thatcher worked in the media upon graduating before getting into electoral politics. Johnson and Gove in particular worked at various right-wing newspapers spreading anti-European views masquerading as news reporting and analysis.
There was a fourth member of the their circle, Republican pollster/propagandist Frank Luntz who was at Oxford at the same time doing a doctorate in politics, who provided a connection back to like-minded next gen conservatives in Washington.
The primary transatlantic spreader of anti-European views in America is the Murdoch press. Both Johnson and Gove have worked for Murdoch’s The Times in London and Nigel Farage features regularly in the NY Post and on Fox News.
Murdoch’s attitude to Europe, at least as it is symbolized by the EU has always been clear, according to British journalist Anthony Hilton in the London Standard in 2016:
Murdoch denies having said that. Few people believe him.
MAGA’s hatred of Europe is a long dishonorable story and there is an irony in it. The Martyr Margaret was less of an anti-European than her acolytes on both sides of the Atlantic claim she was. In the Nottingham speech quoted earlier she said:
We believe that Britain is in Europe to stay …
Our links with Europe have been the dominant factor in our history. Not just geographically, but culturally. The ideas of democracy, human rights, the rule of law. Music, the arts, the sciences. These are the hallmarks of a civilisation which shaped not only Europe's future but that of the world. Britain's destiny lies in Europe and our membership makes Britain stronger. And Europe stronger too.
The same is true of America, although the MAGAts won’t acknowledge it. Indeed, their leader seems intent on destroying whatever good feeling Europe might have for America. Last week, Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz submitted to what is now a ritual for foreign leaders visiting the Oval Office, being insulted by Trump on camera.
But the Trump regime does have a point about NATO funding. The question is, to go back to the top of this newsletter, what should the Alliance be spending their money on?
When it comes to defense spending, the numbers bandied about are astronomical. Last week Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced the UK would build 4 new nuclear subs and the warheads to arm them. Price tag at £55 billion. That’s only one example of arming to fight not the last war but the notional wars of 60 years ago.
Meanwhile the wars of this century so far have been fought with weapons manufactured in sheds, like Ukraine’s drones, and Iraq’s roadside IEDs. Cost: in the mid-4 figures for drones. Less for the IEDS.
A small, asymmetric attack, streamed onto the internet is devastating. It may only kill a small number of soldiers but the multiplier effect of its replay on both sides’ morale can swing a conflict one way or the other.
America’s soldiers in Iraq were courageous and well-armed but the US lost the war the first time an IED blew up an American armored personnel carrier going down a Baghdad highway and the video was streamed onto youtube with the videographer screaming Allahu Akbar.
Propaganda allied to small actions: that’s how wars are fought and won now, not by divisions facing each other across vast open areas.
Following his session with Donald Trump last week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Germany would,
“remain dependent on the US for a long time”
But building increasingly complex battle hardware — or buying it from America — is not the way forward. The F-35 fighter jet was more than a decade late in delivery and 80% over budget. If you have to fight now, something on the drawing boards for next decade ain’t gonna help.
If the MAGA-run US consciously uncouples from Europe it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There are plenty of garden sheds from Portsmouth to Poznan available for drone manufacturing.
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Such thoughtful, intelligent essays are worth every penny of my subscription. You are always a must read Michael and this one is brilliant as usual.
terrific piece Michael, thank you - I did not realize NFarage - what a large mouth he has! - was so high in the polls - I feel the same sinking feeling every time the Economist reports how Trump’s approval is “dropping” yet when all the granular data is over, he still sits at 43%, to my mind a pretty high number, especially considering the emboldened kleptocracy - worries me that so many people don’t care, this is what they’ve always done, so what - anyway, lastly, I have to report that as a loyal Angeleno I am unable to see the image of the drone attack explosion as anything but a slightly warped rendition of the Bob’s Big Boy Hamburger chain mascot - have a good week!