It’s been 10 years since Angela Merkel, as German chancellor, memorably declared “Wir schaffen das” — “We can do this” — in the face of the mass migration crisis sweeping Europe. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported, “For the first time, populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in the U.K., France and Germany.” Similar parties are already in power or in government in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, to say nothing of the United States.
To say the West’s turn to the anti-immigrant right was the predictable result of Merkel’s calamitous decision to open Germany’s borders does not mean there aren’t still lessons to be learned from it — not least by the world’s most clueless of all major political parties today, the Democratic Party.
Starting around 20 years ago, perhaps earlier, liberal democracy gained two half-siblings: postliberal democracy and preliberal democracy.
Preliberal democracy accepts the practice of regular elections but rejects most of the core values of liberalism: free speech and moral tolerance, civil liberties and the rights of the accused, the rule of law and independence of courts, the equality of women and so on. Turkey under the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan typifies this type of democracy, as did Egypt under the short reign of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.
Postliberal democracy, by contrast, embraces the values of liberalism but tries to insulate itself from the will of the people. The European Union, with its vast architecture of transnational legislation, is one example of postliberalism; international courts, issuing rulings where they have no jurisdiction, are another; global environmental accords, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (signed by the Obama administration but never ratified by Congress), are a third.
Standing between these two models is old-fashioned liberal democracy. Its task is to manage the tension, or temper the opposition, between competing imperatives: to accept majority will and protect individual right, to defend a nation’s sovereignty while maintaining a spirit of openness, to preserve its foundational principles while adapting to change. If the frustration of liberal democracy is that it tends to proceed in half-steps, its virtue is that it advances on more secure footing.
That’s the ideal that much of the West essentially abandoned in recent years. On the political left but also the center-right, postliberal policymaking largely determined the outcome of the two most basic political questions: First, who is “us”? And second, who decides for us?
Merkel never sought the approval of German voters to relax the country’s immigration laws and take in nearly a million people over the space of a year. Americans didn’t elect President Joe Biden on any promise to let in millions of migrants over the southern border. Post-Brexit Britons never thought they’d bring in an astounding 4.5 million immigrants to a country of just 69 million between 2021 and 2024 — under Tory leaders, no less.
No wonder the reaction to years of postliberal governance has been a broad turn to its preliberal opposite. Not all right-wing populist parties are the same, and there are meaningful differences between, say, the ill-disguised fascism of the Alternative for Germany and the pragmatic conservatism of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister. But all of them have risen on the same core complaint: that postliberal governments used obscure legal mechanisms or simply ignored the law to attempt a social transformation without society’s explicit consent. In America, it’s called replacement theory.
Liberals and progressives typically dismiss replacement theory as antisemitic, racist demagoguery, and no doubt there are plenty of bigots who believe it. But maybe some measure of understanding ought to be extended to ordinary voters who merely wonder why they should be made to feel like unwelcome outsiders in parts of their own country or asked to pay a share of their taxes for the benefit of newcomers they never agreed to welcome in the first place or extend tolerance to those who don’t always show tolerance in return or be told to shut their mouths over some of the more shocking instances of migrant criminality.
What most of these voters are feeling isn’t racism. It’s indignation at having their normal and appropriate political concerns dismissed as racism. And as long as politicians and pundits of the traditional political establishment treat them as racists, the far right is going to continue to rise and flourish.
There’s something partisans of the center-right and center-left could do: Instead of discreetly murmuring that, say, Merkel or Biden got immigration policy wrong or that it was morally and economically right but politically foolish, they can grasp the point that control over borders is a sine qua non of national sovereignty, that mass migration without express legislative consent is politically intolerable, that migrants ought to be expected to accept, not reject, the values of the host country and that hosts should not be expected to adapt themselves to values at odds with a liberal society.
At that point, hopefully, the values of liberal democracy — including an appreciation of the virtues of immigrants — might begin to reassert themselves. Until then, the preliberal tide will continue to surge.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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