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There are a few interesting trends playing out right now with Trump’s second term. One is the more aggressive stance his administration has taken towards Europe. I think you’re seeing that reflected in the rhetoric of some of his supporters as well, which creates something of an unnecessary rift between Europeans and Americans on social media.
One interesting consequence has been that as Europe gets cut off from from the safe connection with the US there seems to be a bit more realism coming from European politicians. We now have people like Keir Starmer coming out essentially acknowledging that multiculturalism has been a failure — an engineered failure.
Just recently, Starmer called the UK an island of strangers. Suddenly, it seems like there are many within the deep state circles of European countries talking about the security issues this poses. For example, there was a very interesting article by Dominic Cummins, who is a former advisor to Boris Johnson, where he claimed that there’s something of an open discussion happening right now within the security state of Britain about the potential security crisis that’s in the making due to multiculturalism and mass immigration.
And it seems like we’re seeing a lot more of those conversations. At the same time, it seems to be empowering a center-Left, anti-American pseudo-populism, which is still committed to mass-immigration and multiculturalism. We saw this recently in Canada, where Trump was a big part of the reason that Pierre Poilievre lost so much support.
So there is a way in which it can kind of undermine Right populism. Another trend that I’m a little bit concerned about is that you can look back, and it’s interesting if you look at the UK in the 1970s, there was actually quite a swell of nationalist populism. There were quite radical nationalist groups that were able to put tens of thousands of people on the streets in the UK.
And looking back now, it basically disappeared with the election of Margaret Thacher. And for a while in Europe, and in the West generally, you had this split in politics of Left-wing social democracy, the classic kind of European welfare state, and then Thatcherism or Reaganism on the Right, a Right that was built around these neoliberal economic ideas.
Those two trends merged in the late nineties with people like Clinton and Blair. Then we had a long period of this new kind of social liberalism that was more market friendly but maintained much of the Leftist ideals of social democracy. Interestingly, there now seems to be a re-emergence of that kind of Thatcherite neoliberalism with people like Javier Milei in Argentina. I think Elon Musk and his influence has been a big part of this. And even if you look at the Reform party in the UK, they’re now receiving a lot of support. Of course, that mostly coming from anger at mass immigration and the hope that they’ll reverse that. But you look at their politics, it’s not a party that’s in favor of Remigration or even very critical of the multicultural project.
Reform is led by a lot of old Tories who yearn for a return to a kind of Thatcherism. Even Rupert Lowe, who was recently expelled from the party, is a fine example of this. And my concern, and this is in some ways fed by Trumpism, and the whole new media ecosystem around Trumpism, is what Angelo Plume termed “slopulism.” You see a lot of this now in Europe, where populists tend to lean into the slop populism, they lean into the Trumpism, the Elon Musk inspired, libertarian-coded stuff.
And it’s a lot easier for people to go down the route of telling their audience that the problem is the big, bloated state, so what we really need is our own DOGE or Javier Milei, and, direct the populist energies to that rather than immigration, which is of course the main source of angst driving people to a populist answer. That is the concerning trend for European populists in the age of Trump.
And so we must once again take the fight to this fake Right that’s trying to redirect our energy to easier, less contentious secondary issues and away from the big issue, which is mass-immigration and its solution in Remigration. There are lot of opportunities presented by this moment, but there are many divergences that that we need to watch out for.