Going Geert

Underwhelming as his interview of ex-Congressman Eric Massa was on Tuesday, Glenn Beck may have drawn the greatest criticism this week for lambasting Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whom Beck described as a “fascist” during his Monday show. David Swindle at David Horowitz’s Newsreal found Bret Baier’s coverage of Wilders during the Special Report news hour questionable as well, taking exception to the characterization “far right” and the MSNBC-like deployment of such loaded phrases as “inspires fierce emotions.” Across the blogosphere there’s a groundswell of sentiment that Fox fluffed this one badly; dark theories abound that Saudi investors are running Fox’s editorial content, while more sober spectators merely cast Fox panelist Charles Krauthammer’s distinction between Islam and Islamism as an “Orwellianism.”

This is one of those situations in which everyone has a point and no one seems to have it entirely right. I dismiss out of hand the idea that Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and A.B. Stoddard of The Hill – Monday’s pundit panel on Special Report – spouted opinion on cue from a squad of CAIR thought police lurking off camera. If Bill Kristol calls Wilders a demagogue, I believe that’s because he actually thinks Wilders is a demagogue. Charles Krauthammer is famous for his logical precision and insistence on distinctions that matter; calling it Orwellian when he distinguishes between Islam, the religion embraced by non-radical millions, and Islamism, the extremist ideology, seems quite as wrongheaded to me as denying that Islam can easily be adapted to vicious purposes. I’ve never heard Krauthammer engage in such denial.

What this kerfuffle in American punditry highlights, however, is a widening chasm between elite opinion in the liberal West and the sentiments of the ordinary people, who have to live out in their daily lives our culture’s uncomfortable truce with the ambiguities of Islam. That ought to give us pause.

The truth about Geert Wilders seems to be that he does advocate some policies conservatives can legitimately find extreme, such as outlawing religious preaching in languages other than Dutch, banning the building of new mosques, and privileging the Netherlands’ “Christian, Jewish, and liberal” heritage explicitly in the Dutch constitution. He makes political points in much the way Rush Limbaugh often does: by revealing the extremism of his opponents through the use of subversive, turn-about analogies. This seems to have been the approach behind his film Fitna and his celebrated call for the Qu’ran to be banned. Wilders’ political party has also called for a reunification of the Netherlands and Flanders (now part of Belgium), which, while it’s hardly a dead issue or one that doesn’t appeal to a constituency in Flemish Belgium, is also not the sort of platform plank that confers an air of gravitas.

Conventional opinion may well regard all this as demagoguery, and not without reason. But while it’s yet more demagoguery when critics accuse conventional opinion of being sold out to the Saudis, conventional opinion needs to do some house cleaning of its own. There are two supremely important facts that conventional American conservatives miss by focusing on Wilders’ (relative) rhetorical flamboyance (for a Dutch politician), and on the elements of his party’s platform that we wouldn’t support.

(None of which, incidentally, can be characterized as “fascist.” Beck simply has that wrong. A limited but explicit Dutch nativism is as close as Wilders’ party gets to anything approaching the fascism of the Nazis, and there is no resemblance at all to the original fascism of Mussolini. Wilders is also the opposite of an anti-Semite: he regards Judaism as integral to the heritage of Europe and the West, and in fact lived and worked in Israel as a young man, has visited Israel often since then, and pointedly considers Israel an outpost of the West – and indeed, in his own words, as the West’s “first line of defense” against the encroachment of radical Islam. Sympathetic biographies further portray Wilders as liking Arabs and appreciating Arab culture; reportedly, he considers the political limitations imposed by Islam to be a sadly inhibiting factor for them.)

The facts conventional conservatives miss are these.  First, Geert Wilders is being tried in a Dutch court for what essentially amounts to the “crime” of making his points the way Rush Limbaugh does.  This trial, this execrable misuse of the justice system, is a much worse problem – an epic indictment, in fact, of our weary civilization – than anything at all that Wilders himself has said or done.

I can make the case that Wilders is not, in fact, a libertarian; no one could be who wants to restrict religious sermons to the Dutch language or prohibit the building of mosques. I can make the case that he’s not all that Reaganite; no one in Europe is Reaganite.  Europeans come from a different past.  They’ve never lived under the American system of government or political thought.  We have put the idea of government constituted by a yeoman citizenry into practice far more than they have; except for the British Isles, most of Europe moved rapidly from feudalism to industrial-era statism without passing through any serious small-government stage of the kind we Americans carry among our most basic tribal images.

But while these distinctions matter, they don’t matter nearly as much as the fact that Geert Wilders is being tried in court for literally nothing more than exercising free speech. He’s being tried because Muslims objected to what he said when he was exercising free speech. And frankly, the alarming wrongness of that is what we ought to be focusing on.

The other fact we shouldn’t miss is that Wilders, with his shock-speech tactics, evinces a much better understanding than conventional conservatives do of the dilemmas and indignities facing ordinary Dutchmen in their daily lives, as they deal with the encroachment of Islam on their culture. Moroccan Muslims have singlehandedly caused crime in Dutch cities to skyrocket. Dutch cities are like others across Europe, in which Jews find themselves increasingly harassed – even assaulted – and women in Western dress are less safe from rape and assault by Muslims with each passing year, while there are now Muslim neighborhoods the police won’t enter. And with these developments imposing new restrictions – of intimidation and fear – on the lives of Dutch people living in their own civilization, the political authorities emphasize not the restoration of law and order, or freedom of movement for native-born citizens, but regulations to prevent the offense of Muslims.

Almost no Americans have to worry about Muslims rioting in our streets, raping our daughters if they ride the bus alone and aren’t wearing abayas, or beating our Jewish friends with chains in alleys.  Far more Europeans, however, have to worry about that today than had to worry about it 30 years ago.  Charles Krauthammer’s distinction between Islam and Islamism is a real and significant one, but it’s not nearly as relevant on the streets of Amsterdam as it is in the White House Situation Room.  In the Netherlands, the problem with Islam – not Islamism, Islam – is that its adherents are too likely to be part of a growing criminal underclass whose restiveness and resort to intimidation, both armed and political, threaten the bonds of trust and common notions of decency essential to civilized life.

Geert Wilders is the emblem of something very, very important.  He is the emblem of the failure of conventional Western liberalism – of either the left or the right – to figure out a way to preserve our culture and daily life for Westerners, while distinguishing for policy purposes between Islam, the religion in theory, and Islam the cultural and political manifestation.

The remedies proposed by Wilders and his party don’t all resonate with the precepts of classical Western liberalism.  Suppressing a religion, excluding its adherents from one’s borders, favoring other religions by name in a nation’s constitution – these aren’t liberal, freedom-of-thought-and-religion measures.  Taking them against one religion would open doors that we want to remain closed – as bulwarks of our own freedom.  It’s not just valid, it’s essential, to point this out.

But the shrinking of life in parts of Europe, the loss of freedom and latitude for citizens in their daily lives – these are real and crucially important.  They mean, in fact, everything.  It’s awfully easy to prioritize the distinction between Islam and Islamism when the only Muslim you’re likely to encounter on a given day is a good-natured taxi driver or your kid’s orthodontist. Many Dutch and other European citizens, however, live in a different reality.

As long as conventional conservatives fail to address this reality – and as long as the left does too – politicians who aren’t afraid to talk about it, and who propose to do something about it, will resonate with a growing number of voters.  Enough people are now experiencing material inconvenience, loss of freedom, and a declining quality of life that they feel, justifiably, like that’s too high a price to pay for the distinctions that give Islam, the religion in theory, constitutional protections.

I would urge American conservatives to avoid the error of not listening.  The Dutch voters know far better than an American pundit does what impact Islam, as a cultural manifestation, has on their daily lives – and they are fully justified in being concerned and looking for redress.  If Geert Wilders has the wrong answers, we should propose the right ones, rather than merely criticizing him as a demagogue.