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May 16, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Death of an “Extremist” The assassination of Pim Fortuyn should make us think hard. By John O’Sullivan, from the June 3, 2002, issue of National Review

im Fortuyn's assassination by an "environmental activist" in Holland, like the shaking of a kaleidoscope, produces dramatically different new patterns of politics. Together with September 11, it tells us that old political orthodoxies are breaking down and new political alliances are being formed.

Initially, the U.S. and West European media told us that we should see the assassination ambiguously, as a murder that was almost deserved because the victim was "far right," "an extremist," "ultra-right," "the Dutch Le Pen," etc. (His presumed murderer merited nothing worse than "activist.") Nor was Fortuyn alone the threat. As the Associated Press put it, his rise "mirrored a right-wing resurgence in several European countries, lately high-lighted by the anti-immigrant Jean-Marie Le Pen's surprise showing."

Within a short time, however, Fortuyn's real political opinions began to be reported (mainly via the network of libertarian and conservative web-loggers on the Internet). Pim Fortuyn, it turned out, represented the slightly oddball pacific liberalism of post-1960s Holland. He was a gay libertarian whose main deviations from Dutch orthodoxy were that he favored Thatcherite economics, wanted to subject further moves toward European integration to the sovereignty of democratic Holland, called for a halt to immigration on the grounds that high-density Holland was "full," and believed that Muslim immigrants already there should assimilate to the liberalism of Dutch society. The press had to bend him out of philosophical shape in order to make him a fascist threat. Mark Steyn parodied their efforts wonderfully with his imaginary BBC announcer declaring, "Not since the 1930s have we witnessed the disturbing spectre of so many gay professors on the march across Europe in their screamingly camp jackboots."

Exactly the same combination of oversimplification and outright falsehood could be found in the media picture of an "extreme right" resurgent throughout Europe. It is in reality a multitude of anti-establishment attitudes. The Danish "extreme right" party, for instance, wants to protect its nation's welfare state from the demographic pressures of high immigration. Le Pen may be an anti-Semite at heart, but his voters seek a crackdown on the high levels of crime, including attacks on Jews. Fortuyn wanted to preserve the ultra-tolerant liberalism of Holland (that allowed, among other things, his own recreational drug-taking and promiscuity) against the puritanism of the growing Muslim minority. And so on. None of these attitudes, however, is currently acceptable to European elites. Their articles of faith are that immigration is necessary and politically unavoidable, that opposition to Muslim immigration in particular is a far greater problem than the immigration itself, that nationalism is a backward and illiberal doctrine, and that the protest parties are simply expressions of racism and economic insecurity.

They cannot admit that human-rights liberalism and a genuine multiculturalism are incompatible and that some cultures, notably Islamic ones, reject major elements in the West's concept of human rights — such as equality between the sexes. Underlying that inability is a failure to grasp that liberalism is itself a Western invention, or that it is part and parcel of the national identity of individual Western nations in subtly varying forms. The press treats all nationalism as incipient fascism, even though Fortuyn's patriotism incorporated Holland's tolerance of homosexuality, and a British patriot might be especially proud of the Royal Navy's suppression of the slave trade.

In short, there are such things as liberal nationalisms and nationalist liberalisms — something incomprehensible to orthodox multicultural liberal opinion and thus increasingly dangerous to it.

As the contradictions within multicultural liberalism have become more obvious, these nationalist strains of liberalism have begun to gain ground against the dehydrated ideologies of the social-democratic/corporate-conservative establishment. And they are pushing four electoral groups — feminists, gays, Jews, and the proletariat — away from their traditional left allegiance toward new allies on the right. Feminists were the first to argue that Muslim values conflicted with the liberation of women as understood in the West. It is almost ten years since the British feminist writer Fay Weldon published a pamphlet attacking the idea that a multicultural West should allow such innovations as arranged marriages or a restricted education for girls. Today the presence of large Muslim communities, some supplying volunteers for the Taliban, is pushing feminists toward a recognition that Western society, however theoretically patriarchal, has many features worth defending.

Gays are moving in the same direction. In their case, economic self-interest joins a sense of cultural threat to make conservatism appealing and the bureaucratic Left much less so. As the former British Tory MP, Matthew Parris, himself gay, argued in the London Times: "Add the economic individualism which accompanies a man who has left home, plus the particular fear of violence which haunts those for whom the terrors of the school playground find their echo later in a nervousness of yobs, and you have the ingredients not only of Pim Fortuyn's free-market economics, but of his message on law and order too." Pim's politics also overlap with those of Andrew Sullivan, the former New Republic editor who has been among the most severe critics of "Islamo-fascism."

Jews, of course, are nervous of multiculturalism because they are nervous of Muslims. The fear of anti-Israeli Muslim violence is augmented by the reasonable suspicion that anti-Semitism now comes more from the multicultural Left than from the nationalist Right. And this may also explain why, according to opinion polls, American Jews — though they face much lesser threats — are beginning to reconsider their long support for immigration. And blue-collar workers are hostile to liberal multiculturalism because they are more unashamedly patriotic than the middle classes, face low-wage competition from the immigration encouraged by multiculturalism, and associate the rising crime wave with that immigration (not always wrongly). Support for the National Front in France came disproportionately from the old left-wing working-class areas, as the Communist vote collapsed. A multicultural Left is resented by the Left's traditional supporters.

Realignments, however, are complicated matters. Just as gays, lesbians, Jews, and workers may be moving into a liberal-nationalist coalition, so the religious Right is tempted to flirt with conservative Muslims. Melanie Phillips, a social-conservative British columnist, found Pim Fortuyn both admirable and repellent. She admired his courage, style, and cultural self-confidence, but objected to his moral libertarianism. He personified for her the collapse of traditional Christian values in Europe. And she warned that if this hedonistic post-Christian vacuum continued, then an energetic Islam might eventually fill it to provide at least some moral foundation for society.

This would, of course, be an alien foundation — hostile not only to drug-taking and promiscuity but to many essential liberal values. Yet Phillips's arguments are serious ones. Until September 11 there were signs that the religious Right in the U.S. might join with Muslims in the defense of traditional morality against a secularizing state. But the fact that some Muslims supported the attack on the World Trade Center, the widespread Muslim hostility to an Israel now supported by the Christian Right, and the fact that the anti-liberalism of Islam goes far beyond what most conservative Christians would accept (as Phillips herself points out) mean that any Muslim-Christian political alliance is now a pipe dream. The Christian Right remains in the conservative coalition to give a welcome to the gays and feminists not dissimilar to that tendered by Europeans to another boatload of asylum-seekers.

Can an alliance of gays, feminists, nationalists, libertarians, blue-collar workers, and religious voters be assembled in opposition to the multicultural establishment either in Europe or the U.S.? Judging from an intellectual standpoint, no: These are philosophically incompatible groups. But politics is a practical activity, not an intellectual one. As Denis Healey once said, if you can't ride two horses at once, you shouldn't be in the bloody circus. Major political parties like the GOP or the Tories often manage to keep irreconcilable groups united, over decades, in the quest for power. And where the mainstream conservative parties have drawn nationalist voters into their coalition alongside moral traditionalists and economic libertarians, they have not only won power; they have also softened the sharp philosophical edges of all the groups concerned.

Curiously, however, the success of moderate conservatives in drawing such voters away from fringe parties seems to irk the establishment even more than the rise of fringe parties. In an election on the same day as the French first round that elevated Le Pen, Viktor Orban's conservative coalition in Hungary won 49 percent of the vote and became the first all-encompassing conservative coalition on the Anglo-American model in Central Europe. Indeed, Orban drove the fringe nationalist party out of parliament altogether by winning over its voters. This remarkable democratic achievement was described by the New York Times as "ominous," "dangerous," and "poaching on turf that had once belonged exclusively to Hungary's extreme right-wing, openly anti-Semitic party." None of Orban's policies bear any relationship to this caricature, of course. What he really achieved was the creation of a broad-based conservatism that can respectably challenge Europe's multicultural establishment.

Let us hope that he does not have to be assassinated before the media let us know what he really stands for.