U.S. primaries in the Netherlands

My recent Dutch blogs about the 2008 presidential elections have stirred up some opposition.

So ingrained in our public perception is the idea that a "real" Left does not exist in the United States, that saying otherwise leaves people utterly confused or even hostile. They apparently do not notice the irony of denying its existence on the one hand, and finding ideological soulmates among the presidential candidates -- through the online "electoral compasses" -- on the other.

One reader sent me an e-mail suggesting that Hillary Clinton is more conservative than Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders. It is for a reason that Democrats are being called "liberal", he wrote, that term being the usual label for our market-friendly (and formerly most right-wing) VVD party. As for the Republican Party, its credentials can be summed up thus: "Rockefellers + nuclear power + super nation." Welcome to the Netherlands.

I will not even engage in a debate concerning the use of hard power by the United States and its alleged relation to the Rockefeller family, as if real arguments for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq never existed. (In fact, this reader claimed they are "utterly useless little wars," serving merely the agenda of "the lobbyists", whom John Edwards, of course, is heroically taking on.) Let us focus on the notion that the extreme left wing in American politics more or less matches the Right in the Netherlands, or, more generally, in the whole of Europe.

First of all, liberalism in the Netherlands in name represents free markets, individual liberties, freedom of religion, and the degrading of religious beliefs to -- as we say in Dutch -- "behind one's front door." With this emphasis on individualism came a long list of entitlements, including the right to abortion and euthanasia. While the VVD's stances on the latter issues resemble those of the Democrats, however, its attitude toward economic liberty has -- overall at least -- been friendlier.

Admittedly, the VVD has not always been very consistent in its application of liberal principles ("liberal" in the classical meaning of the word). Although having been in power quite a number of years since World War II, it has never been able -- nor perhaps even willing -- to check the social democratic PvdA party's love for redistributing income. In fact, the Dutch welfare state has always found solid support across the political spectrum, even though the parties differed of opinion as to how intrusive it ought to be.

Only when the 1973 oil crisis and a prolonged period of stagflation in that same decade laid bare the negative consequences of social engineering, the VVD -- riding the neoliberal wave of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher -- shifted somewhat to the right, becoming more critical of big government and immigration. But following chairman Frits Bolkestein's (picture) farewell to Dutch politics in 1998, the party's tone with regards to immigration and integration once more became an appeasing one.

So it has been throughout the VVD's existence. While flip-flopping on issues relating to immigration, it has combined market liberalism with a socially liberal agenda, the latter including calls for the legalization of abortion and euthanasia, and the toleration of soft drugs and prostitution. In this respect, the VVD is little different from political parties on the Left, and the resulting liberal conformity on social issues in Dutch politics stands in direct connection to our self-proclaimed "tolerance" of less traditional lifestyles.

The party's evident lack of American-style conservative influences manifests itself in this subordination of individual duties to individualistic rights. Its staunch secularism -- basically dismissing religion as an illiberal relic of the past -- has led the VVD to ignore the idea that liberalism can only be sustained in a society supported by Judeo-Christian and classical traditions. It is clear that it has given too much leeway to the liberal academia who saw marriage and virtue as mere products of oppressive social constructs, which in turn has reinforced the popular demand for new non-establishment politicians on the Right.

Now we have established that conservatism hardly exists in the Netherlands, let us look at the Left in the United States. My personal experience is that America's Marxism seems to be more cultural than Europe's; it is less preoccupied with economic class warfare than with the "empowerment" of socially repressed groups in society. Familiar examples include women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals, whose alleged socio-economic deprivation is -- just like in Europe -- perceived to be culturally constructed and sustained by institutions such as slavery, capitalism, and Christianity.

Nevertheless, the idea of economics -- as well as society -- being a zero-sum game in which some inevitably lose, is well-established among liberal intellectuals in the U.S. Nowhere is this more clear than on the international relations and political science departments of universities across the country, where youngsters are invariably being taught that the Cold War escalated as a result of President Truman's aggressive tone, that both capitalism and socialism come with up and downsides, and that Islamic terrorism struck America because of the latter's decades-long oppression of the Islamic world.

The spirit of the 1960s had an influence on this liberal perception of foreign policy that was perhaps even larger than in Europe. So drastically a departure from America's self-perception as "shining city upon a hill" was the Vietnam War perceived to be, that the liberal mood towards the American hegemony rapidly turned into a radical sense of white man's guilt. To this "New Left", every demonstration of hard power on behalf of the Americans smacked of neo-colonialism, and all economic inequality in the world was caused by capitalism.

Sound familiar? The writings of William Apple Williams, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said have not fallen on deaf ears. Neither has John Edwards's blabbering about the "two America's", and his repeated claims that big companies are enemies of the people. The only difference with the Netherlands is that conservatives in the U.S. have never given up defending American values against the devolution of liberalism from the 1960s onward. In addition, the emergence of the New Left also led to a counter-movement by liberals who -- in their own words -- got "mugged by reality." Realizing that, "at least for now, capitalism seems to be a more efficient creator of wealth for all than socialism," these so-called "neoconservatives" rejected the naive social engineering on behalf of the Great Society, and also opposed the "appeasement" of the Soviet Union during the period of detente in the 1970s.

Politics in the U.S. is not one-sided, public opinion in the Netherlands is. While the Dutch are able to choose between liberal and even more liberal, the perception of America as a conservative bastion of religiously-fundamentalist, war-mongering cowboys serves as a useful warning for what our own country will develop into, should we elect the right-wing populists into power who are threatening our tolerant, consensus-based political system.

Better indeed to stick with the establishment, whose ever-expanding intrusions into our private lives at least provide us with the safety of a life-long income and free healthcare. Even if it has not been able to protect our borders from being crossed by massive amounts of immigrants, who not even tolerate, let alone embrace, the very freedoms the liberal elites have been imposing upon our society so relentlessly since the 1960s.