An Encouraging Report on Populist Attitudes in Europe

UK-based think tank Demos has put out a report on supporters of European populist groups  (“The rise of Populism in Europe can be traced to online behaviour”).  The report is based on over 10,000 survey responses filled out by followers of Facebook pages maintained by 14 such groups in 11 countries (e.g., France’s Front National, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, the Dutch Party for Freedom, Sweden Democrats, and the BNP).  Supporters of these groups are predominantly young (63% under 30) compared with 51 per cent of Facebook users overall; 75% are male

This is good news because young people are the future. It is they who will suffer the most from the ongoing disaster to our civilization resulting from the massive invasion of non-Whites. These results also show that substantial numbers of young people are able to develop these attitudes despite growing up in a media and educational culture that has been saturated by the opposite attitudes since before they were born.

I suspect that the great majority of these young people have personally experienced the costs of multiculturalism in their  schools and neighborhoods—e.g., the de facto ethnic segregation apparent throughout our glorious multicultural landscape, the resulting “us vs. them” attitudes, and perhaps being victimized or knowing White victims of crime by non-Whites. At some point, one’s personal experience trumps the constant drumbeat of multicultural propaganda emanating from the elite media and the educational establishment.

Substantial percentages of these young people are well-educated: 53 per cent saying that they were educated to college or university level or had attained a vocational qualification. This is good news because it indicates a broad level of support for populist parties that belies the media stereotype that concerns with immigration and cultural identity are a mark of lack of education.

The study used an open-ended question to assess why people joined these groups. This is unfortunate because it may not be a good indicator of the attitudes of these people. For example, the most common reason was simply that they agreed with the ideas of the group they were associated with (38% on average). This tends to underestimate how likely they are to agree with the specific attitudes mentioned by many respondents. (E.g, 17% volunteered that they were concerned about immigration, but this is surely an underestimate given that the groups they support are strongly anti-immigration.)

Responses on specific attitudes indicated a broad concern with the erosion of cultural identity, the incompatibility of Islam with European civilization, crime by immigrants, and “fear of a bleak future in which immigrants will outnumber nationals” (my worst nightmare as well). As one respondant said, “The loss of French customs, traditions. There are so many foreigners and we are almost struck with shame to be white and love our country.” And another: “I am sick of seeing my homeland being ripped apart and the crime rate and rapes going through the roof with this scum coming into my country and ripping it apart and no one is doing a thing to stop it.”

It is also gratifying to see so many young Europeans disillusioned with the political elite and with political institutions that they see as dominated by people who fundamentally do not have their interests at heart.  A National Front member wrote: “The desperate lies of the MPs, the comfortable way in which they live whilst the French face a multitude of problems such as insecurity, mass immigration and the middle class, who always pay the price.” Indeed.  Only 10% of the sample thought their country was on the right track.

The study is noteworthy also for the respectful way they discussed their subjects. The picture presented of the people attracted to these movements departs radically from the image one usually encounters in the media: uneducated, emotionally unstable, economically insecure haters. Jamie Bartlett of Demos, the principal author of the report, takes a respectful stance toward his subjects:

[Bartlett] said it was vital to track the spread of such attitudes among the new generation of online activists far more numerous than formal membership of such parties. “There are hundreds of thousands of them across Europe. They are disillusioned with mainstream politics and European political institutions and worried about the erosion of their cultural and national identity, and are turning to populist movements, who they feel speak to these concerns.

“These activists are largely out of sight of mainstream politicians, but they are motivated, active, and growing in size. Politicians across the continent need to sit up, listen and respond.”

This quote appeared in an article in the left-leaning Guardian titled “The rise of the far right in Europe“. Where Bartlett terms his subjects ‘populists’, a term suggesting that they are common people ignored or oppressed by elites, the Guardian sees them as a “far-right” menace, the term “far-right connoting extremism with not so subtle intimations of Nazism. Doubtless feeling that Bartlett’s descriptions were inadequate, the Guardian solicited comments from Guardian columnist Gavan Titley, an “expert on the politics of racism in Europe” who was happy to inform readers that what was really going on was an opportunistic change of “racist strategies”:

Racist strategies constantly adapt to political conditions, and seek new sets of values, language and arguments to make claims to political legitimacy. Over the past decade, Muslim populations around Europe, whatever their backgrounds, have been represented as the enemy within or at least as legitimately under suspicion. It is this very mainstream political repertoire that newer movements have appropriated.

Here’s a Titley column cheering shutting down an appearance by the BNP’s Nick Griffin, described by Titley as the result of “sustained democratic opposition”—i.e., mass protests and intimidation by “anti-racist” activists. I can’t resist this quote:

“Migration” is nearly always debated in the abstract, because the point is not to examine migration as a multidimensional process, inseparable from, among other factors, the spatialised inequalities of capitalism, or the human impact of the conflicts in which the “beleaguered” west is fully implicated.

Titley’s Marxist professors would be proud at how thoroughly he has been indoctrinated against his own people and culture. The reason people in the Third World are poor is the “spatialized inequalities of capitalism.” And the reason there are never-ending wars in Africa and revolving-door despotisms and civil conflicts throughout the Arab world and Africa is somehow the fault of the evil West. (This is the sort of thinking demolished by Ricardo Duchesne in his The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.)

Fortunately, a lot of young people are not listening to their Marxist professors. The establishment is worried. The rise of these movements reflects legitimate grievances that are completely ignored by political, academic, and media elites. Calling them “racist strategies” will not change this tide—a bit like the worn out socialist rhetoric in the USSR leading up to its collapse. Fewer and fewer people are listening. And no one really believes there’s really anything wrong with not wanting to see the country you grew up in changed beyond recognition into a multicultural nightmare.

As I’ve said before, the revolution will happen in Europe.