The European Revolt Against America’s Identity Politics Is Here

Is Europe coming for America’s hyperventilating woke brigades? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is more nuanced, like the complicated continent itself, but from Britain to, egads, Russia by way of historical American allies (and favorite vacation spots) like Greece and France, political and academic sentiment is coalescing around the idea that something in the American zeitgeist has gone awry.Consider that the Conservative British home secretary, Suella Braverman, has just averred that a multicultural push “will end in tears.” She was referring to issues pertaining to migrant labor and immigration, but the gist is that at the highest levels in Britain, some of the notions of social equity routinely espoused by the radical left in our country are falling by the wayside. Consider also the swift downfall of a former first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, who though caught up in Scottish National Party finance problems was also notably embroiled in a controversy over transgender issues that were widely perceived as out of touch with everyday Scottish priorities.As for France, a lot of attention has been focused on Marine Le Pen lately. As odd as it may sound, the leader of the far-right National Rally faction in the French parliament just received a glowing profile in a guest essay for the New York Times that asked, “Why Is France Acting Like Marine Le Pen Is the Adult in the Room?”The simple answer is that because she is l’adulte dans la chambre — this even though a generation of French voters associates her with her papa, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once notoriously dismissed Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history (and was penalized for it).Ms. Le Pen is deftly leveraging the frustration many French feel toward what they perceive as the elitist and demagogic drift of France’s charming but fickle young president, Emmanuel Macron. According to the article in the Times, polls indicate that were Ms. Le Pen to square off with Mr. Macron in a presidential race today, she would beat him by a 10 percent margin. Although issues like pension reform weigh more heavily on the French voters’ minds than the woke agenda, Ms. Le Pen’s popularity is not due solely to her unrelenting criticism of Mr. Macron and her pledge to reverse his much unloved pension reform should she become president. The National Rally has long positioned itself as the defender of traditional French values and the champion of the working class — both of which resonate with a public suffocated by the condescending cultural headwinds of the kind of neoliberalism favored by Mr. Macron. In Greece, where election season is in full swing, a prominent politician, Antonis Samaras, delivered some remarks about the woke agenda that took many Greeks by surprise. As it happens Mr. Samaras, who served as prime minister between 2012 and 2015, was stumping for New Democracy, the center-right party of the incumbent premier, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Mr. Samaras decried how the “so-called woke culture in the West” is contributing to “the demolition of what constitutes our common heritage.” The normally even-keeled politician hammered away at some woke precepts like “relegating to faceless numbers, Parent 1 and Parent 1,” the “sacred persons of Mother and Father.” He assailed “gigantic” problems like “aping nonsense about how many ‘genders’ there are.” This “abusive entitlement,” Mr. Samaras continued, “leads to a divisive and incomprehensible new language of political correctness” and is “wrong for the West.”Many Europeans believe that he is correct, and it is starting to feel like an open revolt. Of America’s numerous exports to Europe, the one in least demand is the weaponization of personal grievances disguised as tardy social reform. So where is all this heading? Not to the Russian countryside, hopefully. A curious story surfaced in the Moscow Times recently that detailed plans said to be afoot to build a sort of Disney-style hamlet on the outskirts of Moscow for “conservative-minded Americans and Canadians” who are fed up with “the propaganda of radical values” at home.While that story is apocryphal as Russian propaganda is wont to be — it originally appeared in the state-run RIA Novosti — it underscores how the deep divisions in America can damage our credibility abroad. President Biden, seen by commentators such as Victor Davis Hansen as a puppet of the woke left, could unwittingly be playing into the hands of President Putin, who wastes no opportunity to exploit any vulnerability and to knock what he perceives, not altogether erroneously, as America’s strange and possibly dangerous obsession with ersatz issues like gender fluidity.If we want Mr. Putin to lay off the social ribbing, and if we want to stop ruffling our European friends’ feathers — which, after all, have been around for a little longer than ours — then our own pushback against woke chicanery will have to get loud enough to be heard across the Atlantic.

The European Revolt Against America’s Identity Politics Is Here

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