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It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape.
An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it.
Take this dumb paragraph:
“Above all we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture… Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem.”
Phillips’ attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such “libertarianism” undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not – I am not entirely convinced either way – but Fortuyn’s views struck me as entirely coherent.
As for liberalism’s roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment?
Phillips’ analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act.
Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance
Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)
The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the ‘classical liberal’ about him.
In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism’s prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called ‘citizen’) and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.
Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn’s overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.
Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as ‘nightwatchman’… if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.
Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one’s friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o’clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of ‘tolerance’ any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.
Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos… and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don’t be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
Tony Millard strikes again with a Pythian observation.
The following words were captured directly from a radio broadcast – it’s an excerpt from an interview with Fortuyn a couple of weeks ago, in which he was complaining about his security arrangements, that is, total absence thereof:
…when I am killed or wounded then you (prime minister) are responsible because you give me no protection and you make the atmosphere in this country so poisonous that people want to hurt me…Pim Fortuyn, 2002
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
1)Who? and 2) Why?
Dutch anti-immigrant politician Pym Fortuyn has been assassinated.
First reports suggest he was shot several times outside a radio station in Hilversum by a lone gunman.
I think those tectonic plates of history just juddered. Stay tuned.
Tony Millard serves up a tasty critique of politics.
I was listening to Radio 4, my only live link with the Anglosphere, the other day and heard a short trailer for Sunday morning’s news and comment slot, Broadcasting House. The journalist listed out five reasonable-sounding but right wing policies and then sought our amazement by saying they were taken from Le Pen’s manifesto. I got thinking about this whilst doing something pointless with a tractor and it occurred to me that the body politic is in many ways like the human body.
Left wing policies – radicchio and polenta, right wing policies – carpaccio of beef and wild boar sausage. No healthy human body can be properly and efficiently nourished with only one or the other, and it’s the same with nations. Some of Mr Le Pen’s view I am sure are reasonable and meritorious but are rejected wholesale by the left because of some of his less palatable concepts. Unfortunately, our politicians believe in a mostly herbivorous diet and lack conviction when it comes to richer flavours. Perhaps someone should gently remind them of our omnivorous tendencies and introduce them to a Fiorentina (T-Bone steak, Tuscan style) every now and then.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
My Norwegian libertarian friend Kristine Lowe has a personal interest in tattoos, and in their tax status, see above. (“Lowe” is Norwegian for “lion”, hence the nature of her magnificent adornment.) Thus alerted to any tattoo-related media item, she sent me the following report, based on a longer piece in the Norwegian Aftenposten:
Is a tattoo a creative work or simply a reproduction? This is a question Norwegian tax officers have to consider carefully when they come to implement last year’s VAT (Value Added Tax) reform. Tattoos, crosswords and fireworks may be exempted from VAT – as long as they have creative value.
The eight page long tax office guidelines document, Art, culture and sport – an orientation, says that creating an image for a tattoo is indeed a creative work. But to burn it into the skin of someone fooled into the tattoo shop by his mates is “only a reproduction of a creative work protected by copyright”. Hail to the Norwegian authorities’ profound respect for artistic and intellectual property rights.
A concert which is just a concert is also exempted from VAT. A concert venue where people can dance, on the other hand, is logically not. Ballet and traditional dances are exempted from VAT. Disco is not. One could be led to believe that only boring culture is exempted from VAT, but the rules are not that coherent. Stand-up comedians don’t have to pay VAT – but lecturers, presenters and commentators do.
At least we finally have an explanation for why it’s so difficult to get through to the tax office in Norway – they are busy reading crosswords, hanging out in tattoo shops, checking concert venues for dancing space and so on and so forth.
Kristine has also had trouble with her legs. Now me, I’ve never had trouble with Kristine’s legs – see below. But she had a bad accident several years ago, and the original doctors didn’t catch everything. So soon she’s off back to Norway to get everything finally fixed. I and the rest of the libertarian movement wish her all the best.
Well, when he is not a fascist… Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist currently visiting London, takes the view that David Carr was wrong to tar Dutchman Pim Fortuyn with the same brush as the neo-fascist Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen
I have to disagree with some of David Carr‘s analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist ‘right-wing’ successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller’s or Fortuyn’s manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement.
Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being ‘unavailable for democratic dialogue’. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the ‘far right’ like Le Pen.
The shocked left-wing, whose ‘multi-cultural’ agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: “Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race.” And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. “If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I’d say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence.” In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment.
Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn’s anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as ‘city apartheid’. However, he gives a ‘right wing’ answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and ‘politically incorrect’ way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization.
I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully.
Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world.
Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be.
The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it?
The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn.
But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions.
There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?
Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet.
I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic.
Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it.
For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN ‘Safe Havens’ to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen.
If anybody needs a sobering insight into the mindset of the European elites, they need look no further than this staggering decision from an Italian Court.
“The case revolves around a wealthy family in the southern city of Naples, where the father is still paying some $680 a month in maintenance to a son who is in his 30s and has a university law degree”.
Seems that this low-life’s parents have to continue supporting him until he finds a job which is ‘to his liking’ (which, of course, will be never). Hardly an incentive to family-life in a country that already has a negative population growth.
Understandably, the father is less than best pleased:
“I feel disgust for a country that I love. It wasn’t always like this”
Do you think it might occur to him to stop voting for it? No, course not. Silly me.
Italy is becoming interesting
Or, should I say, more interesting because Italy has always struck me as an intriguing place: exotic, sexy, creative, appealing and yet byzantine, noisy and chaotic.
Italy is notorious for its instability. It has had some ridiculously high number of governments since World War II all of which are coalitions of social democrats, christian democrats, communists, fascists and probably a few mafiosi. All of them collapse after a couple of years or so in an orgy of self-destructive conflict and raucous bickering. Corruption is famously rife and state regulation is so labrythine and ridiculous that something like 50% of the population earn their living in the ‘black economy’.
Despite this (or, more likely, because of it) Italy remains a prosperous country but it is clear that Silvio Berlusconi recognises that it will not remain one unless it liberalises its fossilised labour laws which, at present, guarantee a job for life.
“The protesters fear that workers’ rights will not be as well protected if the new laws come to fruition.”
The massive protest in Rome has been billed as a protest against terrorism following the assassination of government adviser Marco Biagi but let nobody be fooled. This was planned long before as a message to Berlusconi that the left are aiming to thwart him. The left and the public sector in Italy (as in the rest of Europe) is well-organised, stridently militant and relies on a hair-trigger willingness to adopt street confrontation as a tactic to defeat reformist politicians who, thus far, have lacked the cojones to face them down.
Berlusconi is talking tough:
“Nobody is going to stop us going ahead with our reforms,” he said. ” Terrorists and street protesters won’t stop us.”
Can he succeed where so many others have previously failed? If so, he will be leading Italy down the road of ‘Thatcherite’ revolution.
Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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