RUTHFULLY YOURS

Europe may be fading from global relevance, but its influence is expanding within the US Democratic Party. Today, the party’s core beliefs echo those espoused by the European Union and much of the British establishment – an embrace of censorship, a draconian approach to climate change, support for trans ideology, the championing of race-based politics and, increasingly, hostility towards Israel and Jews.

With the seamless elevation of Kamala Harris and her ‘white dude’ vice-president pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democratic Party has also embraced the undemocratic methods of the European Commission. The party has turned into a tightly controlled, elite-driven cabal. All this, of course, is justified by Democrats as a way to ‘defend democracy’ against the Trumpian hordes.

Once a truly national presence, the Democratic Party is now almost totally dominated by older, wealthier regions, like the north-east and the West Coast. This parallels establishment politics in Europe, which takes its cues from London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin – places where, as French author Christophe Guilluy notes, there is a ‘hyper-concentration of elites’.

In the not-so-recent past, the Democrats were also a national and sociologically diverse party. It included Catholics, southerners, labour unions, black and Hispanic politicians and oddball entrepreneurs not aligned with the country-club GOP. It was, as humourist Will Rogers pointed out, famously inwardly conflicted. ‘I do not belong to any organised political party’, the Oklahoma native joked, ‘I’m a Democrat’.

Today, Rogers’s chaotic party has achieved a discipline of almost Stalinist proportions. Rather than allow a battle for the presidency, the party rallied around Harris, who has never won a presidential primary. With a speed that would have astounded George Orwell, the Democrats’ media minions took a candidate widely seen as lacklustre and elevated her to mythic status.

For many on the American left, Europe, as one academic describes it, offers ‘a progressive model from which the United States could learn’. Certainly, Europe’s elites favoured Joe Biden’s election, which was widely seen as making America ‘more European’. This model is inspired largely by Europe’s once successful but now deeply troubled social-market economy.

A Harris administration may well prove even more Eurocentric than the current one. Harris’s chief foreign-policy advisor, Philip Gordon, comes from the old school of Europeanists. He would represent a sure shift from the more Asian and Middle Eastern focus of recent administrations. As a longtime ally to pro-Iranian diplomat Robert Malley, Gordon is also likely to be far less sympathetic to Israel and less focussed on China as the US’s primary challenge.

The move to ape European politics reprises themes seen earlier in US history. In the 19th century, American Europhiles included the northern Federalists, who considered leaving the Union during the War of 1812. Some were drawn to the notion of allying with America’s then enemies, the Brits. At the same time, many southern aristocrats yearned to recreate Europe’s class hierarchies in the New World.

Yet as Americans headed West, wrote Frederick Jackson Turner, most declared ‘their independence from Europe’. The same could be said for the East Coast and its universities. Americans had limited enthusiasm for the expanded state and control of daily life that was common in Europe. These sentiments were critical to the rise of Jacksonian democracy, as both Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 19th century and historian Arthur Schlesinger reasserted a hundred years later.

Nonetheless, the appeal of European models continued to captivate the upper classes. As historian Fred Siegel points out, Wilson-era progressives derived much of their inspiration from German models of education, scientific inquiry and political order. Later, although a small group embraced fascism, the longer-lasting Europeanist obsession was with the Soviet Union, which could count on widespread admiration well into the 1950s.

As the Soviet vision lost its appeal, progressive Americans embraced what they saw as the model of European social democracy, with Stockholm and Paris replacing Moscow. At the close of the last century, many progressives, such as Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner, looked to Europe for inspiration to stem American decline. The solution, apparently, was the promotion of an EU-style ‘expert’ class to direct the economy.

Today, outside of its historic charms, Europe isn’t much of a model for anything – except how to decline. The once vaunted European quality of life is dropping, its industrial base is eroding and there seems little promise of future improvement. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone economy grew about six per cent, compared with 82 per cent for the US.

Europe also lags in virtually every major cutting-edge industry from software and space to cars. This is, in part, due to a lack of new tech investment. Among the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in continental Europe. The list is dominated largely by the US, with China in second place.

The EU is certainly not likely to expand its influence in the coming decade. The European Commission projects the bloc’s potential annual growth at less than 1.5 per cent, shrinking to 1.2 per cent by 2027. That’s a decline from around 2.5 per cent at the turn of the century. This is mainly due to declining populations and weak efficiency gains.

Much the same is true in Democrat-controlled ‘Euro-America’. Last year, ultra-blue California ranked last in income growth, followed closely by Maryland, Massachusetts and New York. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled Texas, Nevada, Florida and Arkansas experienced the highest. Overall, in the past decade, the six fastest growing southern states – Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – added more to the national GDP than the north-east, once the nation’s powerhouse.

The differences between the heartland US and its Europhilic counterpart can be seen in policy, too. Biden and Harris generally embrace a regulatory regime that punishes the non-elite sectors of the economy.

The prime driver here has been the imposition of ever-harsher environmental laws. We see this in California, where, as attorney general, Harris was a fierce enforcer of anti-fossil-fuel laws. These have helped to create the most expensive energy in the continental US, the consequences of which have been particularly harsh for the state’s poor and ethnic-minority populations.

Harris promises to be, if anything, more committed to draconian climate laws than Biden. In her failed 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination, she embraced an end to fracking. However, mindful particularly of Pennsylvania, she recently tried to backtrack on this. Her administration also seems likely to mimic EU approaches to fossil fuels, which make continental energy prices multiples higher than those in the US.

If Harris does win in November, there is still hope. In Europe, there is only one economic model, and it comes from Brussels. But the US federal system lets states adopt their own policies. This has allowed for a power shift, both economically and politically, to red states.

The American economy is increasingly shifting towards places like Dallas-Fort Worth, which recently dethroned Chicago as the No2 financial centre in the US. Dallas has even started to raise capital to build a new stock exchange. Then there’s the mass migration of key technology firms – Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle and, perhaps most crucially, Tesla and SpaceX – to the red states.

Even if the Europhiles win this election (thanks more to Trump’s inanity than their own appeal), America’s demographic future will be largely red. The big blue cities are becoming ever more ‘childfree’, while red states trend increasingly toward population growth. Over time, this demographic decline – which includes affluent emigrants from blue states – will keep injecting billions into the economies of Florida, Texas, Tennessee and the Carolinas. Meanwhile, Tim Walz’s Minnesota, where the policy agenda mimics California under much less favourable conditions, has haemorrhaged $5 billion from fleeing residents and a shrinking labour force.

Other critical groups, like affluent young professionals, minorities, immigrants and families, are also fleeing Euro-America. Over time, this will allow the southern and mountain states to gain as many as 14 more congressional seats by 2030.

Given that their economic record is less than inspiring, the Democrats, like their counterparts in Europe, look to identity politics to hold their party together. As the daughter of UC Berkeley academics, Harris cannot claim – like JD Vance does – to have risen from poverty or deprivation. But she can play the victim card supposedly granted to her by her mixed East Indian and Caribbean parentage.

In the US, more heavily non-white than any European country, identity politics is particularly potent. Harris even supported funds to bail out arrested rioters during the 2020 Black Lives Matter disturbances. For his part, Walz presided over the transformation of his once staid state into a playpen for BLM-inspired rioters.

Like European progressives, Harris and Walz also embrace an essentially open-borders policy for refugees and asylum seekers. As Biden’s ‘border tsar’, Harris has been sympathetic to suggestions like granting driver’s licences, free medical care and an easy path to citizenship for undocumented migrants.

For now, the installation of Harris over the doddering Biden has clearly improved the party’s short-term prospects. A potential coalition, as seen in recent UK and European elections, between bereaved minorities, government workers and elite professionals could overwhelm the less organised and sometimes incoherent forces behind Trump.

If they win the election against the self-destructive Trump, we can expect the Europeanised Democrats to consolidate power through their dominance in the government and corporate bureaucracies, as well as in academia and the media. Control of the state gives these forces enormous influence, as bureaucratic power can be used to discipline private companies. It also generally favours bigger firms, which are far more capable of enduring regulation than their smaller rivals.

Under Harris, the US may try to adopt the censorship policies that are already present in the EU and UK. We may well see the Democrats attempt to control social media, including arresting people for offensive speech or before they have even committed a crime at all. At the very least, they could test the limits of the First Amendment.

Biden has already shown a taste for following Europe’s lead on censorship, a trend likely to grow under a Harris-Walz administration. Last year, the EU opened a new office in Silicon Valley to forge closer relationships between EU regulators and Big Tech firms, which have become rulers of the information economy and long-time backers of Harris. EU commissioner Thierry Breton has even gone so far as to threaten Elon Musk with legal action for daring to interview Trump on his own social-media platform, X.

Still, several factors may complicate the triumph of Euro-America. The Bill of Rights, the country’s federal structure and three branches of government make it harder to impose order from the top. This is one reason why Biden and Harris have railed against the Supreme Court, which has long served as a bulwark against concentrated, unimpeded regulatory power.

In the long term, though, the key might be demographics. As in Europe, the most important contest may be between aggrieved minorities, single women and government workers versus people who look more to their family than the state for succor. Populations more dominated by singles and childless couples favour the Democrats, while Republicans do best among stable families, particularly those with children.

Changes in the job market could also prove critical. Acceleration of the trend towards services and away from production tends to help the Europhile elites. People who work with their hands and business-owners tend to vote for the GOP, while those who work as teachers, psychiatrists and lawyers tend to be Democrats.

Ultimately, the question is whether America will become more like Europe – stagnant, culturally ‘progressive’ and increasingly lacking a coherent identity. As of now, the US still has the capacity to declare its independence from European norms. It can still insist, as it has throughout history, that the US is something very different than the continent that spawned it.

After all, Americans possess a vast and extraordinarily rich continent, which is largely self-sufficient in food and energy. More important still, the spirit of striving among Americans of all backgrounds gives the country an innovative advantage that is largely missing in Europe. Nothing illustrates the US’s intrinsic power more than its ability to dominate in space, an effort prototypically led by South African immigrant Elon Musk.

European ideas may enjoy a revival in the next few years, at least until Trump is no longer around to unify the Democrats. But America’s shifting regional balance of power and its rebellious spirit represent a distinct challenge both to Old World elites and their fellow travellers in the US. Just as in the past 250 years, Americans should not embrace Europe, its hierarchies and stagnation, as their favoured future.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, published by Encounter.