Ah, the Economist:

Several years ago the usually pragmatic Dutch stunned Europe by spawning a new far right in the shape of Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party. The Islam-bashing, Eurosceptic Mr Wilders has played a kingmaker role . . .

Wilders certainly has his faults, but it’s revealing that the Economist believes that it would have been a better display of pragmatism for the Dutch to have quietly accepted what the establishment was telling them about the supposed benefits of mass immigration, multiculturalism, and an ever more federal EU.

Readers with a more balanced set of opinions than the sages of St James’s Street might remember the fate of Theo Van Gogh. The Dutch have.

And some might even remember what happened when the Dutch tried to slow down the pace of European integration.

As The Commentator recalled earlier this year:

[F]ormer Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende in 2005 raised the prospect of a second Holocaust should voters say no to the European Constitution in a referendum.
(The Dutch did in fact say no and there wasn’t another Holocaust, but their democratic rights were erased as the Commission and its accomplices simply renamed the Constitution as the Lisbon Treaty and proceeded regardless.)

I guess the Economist thinks that the Dutch should do what they are told and stop complaining. Apparently that’s the pragmatic thing to do.