Inside D.C.

The shift is no joking matter

Europe thinks we’re funny.

I was fortunate enough to be in Europe for the last 10 days or so, mostly on vacation.  Not a lot of Americans pick European cities for their February break, so my wife and I were in the minority based on citizenship in most venues.  Perhaps the dearth of Yankees in Europe explains why we were approached relatively frequently by complete strangers to talk about why America elected Donald Trump president.

During the campaign, liberal friends in London shot us an email which effectively said of Trump and Hillary Clinton: “You’ve got 325 million people in your country.  Is this the best you can do?”  To such comments I’d attempt to explain a democratic republic and a two-party system to folks too accustomed to coalition governments.  I’m not sure they were satisfied, but at least they stopped asking.

The questions were by and large polite and legitimate.  Europeans are not used to the U.S. political pendulum swinging as dramatically as it did on November 8.  Often asked in the United Kingdom, home of the Brexit vote, was the surprising, “How could you go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump?”  I would draw parallels between those voters who made Brexit an unexpected reality and those who rallied to Trump.  I would try and explain what I perceived as the whys and wherefores, but ultimately I would blame the fickleness of the electorate.

In France, those who asked me about the outcome of our election were genuinely amused by the daily news reports they pickup from CNN, Sky News and the BBC.  When I say “amused,” I’m talking Jerry Lewis movie/yuk-yuk amused.

But in serious conversations comparing the political tenor of the U.S. and Europe, if one dismisses the chuckles and the inability to understand U.S. politics, the two populations are generally not so different.

In a post-Brexit United Kingdom, Theresa May, head of the Conservative Party, now lives at No. 10 Downing Street.  Nationalist or populist parties control the assemblies of Hungary and Poland, and these parties are active participants in coalition administration in Finland and Norway.  Austria recently rejected its populist candidate for its presidency, but that candidate pulled in 46% of the vote.  The Netherlands will decide in March if it wishes to go populist, given the Party for Freedom candidate currently leads in the polls.  Populism is a growing phenomenon in Africa and subcontinental Asia.

France’s Marine Le Pen, leader of the ultra-conservative National Front (FN) party is expected to win the first round of voting in France’s April presidential election, though her ultimate fate is questioned much as the experts and pundits in the U.S. questioned Trump’s likelihood of winning the White House.  In a CNN news report I watched in France, the possibility of a Le Pen victory was dismissed by a European Union (EU) official. “It’s impossible for her to be elected president of France,” he said.  Le Pen points out this same gentleman declared Brexit impossible and Trump’s election was impossible.  “He’s been wrong for 30 years,” she said.

Brexit, Trump’s election and the discomfiture of the France, the Netherlands or the EU for that matter, is not the death knell for center/left politics on a global basis.  What is common to these political shifts, however, is massive frustration and impatience.  Frustration by a large and growing class of voter who believe no “insider” politician cares about what he or she cares about, and impatience with the time it takes to roust the bad guys and return power to the people.

No joke.