Mr. Myers is always worthy of the readers time and attention, even though that reader might disagree! Best regards: StephenKMackSD!
Feb 18, 2026
Populist nationalism always lives locally; so it has a situationally specific context.
The common factors. The populist nationalists in both Europe and America share the common feature of being “left behinds” in a state of deep resentment against the cosmopolitan elites that dominate much of their respective societies. Resentment is always the rocket fuel to populist angst.
Most of the resentment is economic and further fueled by the social distinction that goes with higher economic circumstances originating from superior education and/or being born into more privileged circumstances.
Another base of resentment is race and identity grounded in fear of ethnic displacement–the cathedral or church steeple is about to be replaced by the mosque. Underneath religion are the dark dragons of racial resentment; in American reactionary elites have used racial rivalry between left-out whites and excluded African-Americans for centuries. Recent Moslem immigration into Europe shows that culturally distinct foreign immigrants assimilate unevenly and that inclusion must be a concerted public and open process. Education and skills have to be shared so that the vistas of opportunity are perceived as available to all — people care about their children’s prospects.
The Trumpista MAGA group is currently mixing traditional American racism against African Americans and Asians with new anxieties about immigration of non-European-like groups from everywhere with any skin complexion at all (Indians are the new source of anxiety) into one discriminatory stew. One senses the Trumpistas are really overplaying their hand in modern America which is indeed a multicultural society (the Bad Bunny brouhaha just emphasized this). The Republicans are increasingly making Representatives Ilan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into latter day American Joans of Arc, attractive faces of tomorrow’s better America.
A big international factor. For about a half a millennium, a major threat to a pluralistic Europe of many nationalities has been a monolithic, despotic and expanding Russian empire. If one dislikes reigning European elites, simple one-stop shopping will send the disaffected to St. Petersburg or Moscow. No one consistently challenges European reigning elites like a despot in the Kremlin; that has been a constant for centuries except for a brief holiday in the 1990s between the last Communist and the rise of Putin. No one impinges and subverts European governance and with such consistency and intensity as Putin and his regime; that is what they have organized themselves to do. The Ukraine war has always been about more than just Ukraine; it is about Europe and its freedom from predation from the east.
The recent articles in the FT and elsewhere discussing fertility rates way below replacement highlight the emerging hardest of realities — Europe becomes more inclusive or Europe disappears like a declining statistics. Europe has to start making European things work.
But Europe has everything in place to be a growing and more successful Europe. It just has to choose through voting to be a more and better Europe; Victor Orban and the AfD do not offer that pathway at all. Atavistic Russian revanchism is hardly a credible alternative for Europe.
Orban has simply been for sale; he and his clique have just been playing a political arbitrage game using Russia opportunistically to sustain an authoritarian “illiberal” regime inside an institutionally democratic Europe. He and his clique have always been in it for the wealth extraction possibilities intrinsic to state capture. This is a very old game.
https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa
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