What is The Right?

America, Europe and Me

Libertarians used to be, to some extent still are, viewed as an element in the conservative coalition, hence right wing, and I am a libertarian. One result is that when I see some faction somewhere described as right wing my instinctive reaction is positive. That is still true if it is described as far right or radical right. If right is defined as in favor of the free market and opposed to government power, if Barry Goldwater was right and Lyndon Johnson left in the first presidential election that I had any involvement in — I was too young to vote but not too young to campaign for Goldwater and lament his defeat in verse — then a libertarian anarchist is about as far right, and as radical, as it is possible to be.

That is not the only thing that “right” can mean. JD Vance is often described as on the right; as should be clear from my recent posts, he is not a libertarian. His two most prominent policy positions, immigration restrictions and protectionism, are very nearly the opposite of mine. On those two, at least, he manages to be even farther from me than Harris.

That raises the question of what “right wing” currently means. There are multiple political parties in Europe, some major and some minor, that get described as extreme right wing, New Right, or similar labels. What are their common features, how closely do their policy positions fit the positions of Vance and Trump, how closely mine?

To answer those questions I compiled a list of European right wing parties and, for each, its current positions on a range of issues. Researching eight parties in the detail I have been researching Vance would take more work than I was prepared to do on the project so I mostly relied on Wikipedia articles plus whatever else I could easily find online. Readers more familiar with any of the parties are welcome to correct any errors.

The results are shown below. In order to fit the table to the page, I omitted two categories for which I saw no consistent pattern, whether a party identified as classical liberal/libertarian, some claimed the label and some rejected it, and whether it had a favorable view of the welfare state.

Consistent Patterns

All of the parties were critical of immigration, at least of Muslim immigration, a majority also critical of the influence of Islamic immigrants on their country’s institutions.

All were Euroskeptic, at least to the degree of opposing any increase in the power of the EU, any attempt to make it more like a single state.

All were supportive of Israel.

Half expressed support for policies for increased law and order, none expressed opposition to such policies.

Comparison to US Right

The closest equivalent to Euroskepticism in US politics is the issue of federal vs state power. Conservatives have tended to support the decentralist approach so all the consistent patterns of the European parties fit with the views of the current US right, at least as represented by Vance and Trump.

Several of the concerns of the right wing in the US, however, are not reflected in the European parties. Most of the European parties are neither anti-abortion nor pro protectionism. Some support same sex marriage, some only civil unions. One or two include in their arguments against Muslim immigration and culture the risk they pose for homosexuals. One of the leading figures in the AfD (German) is a lesbian.

Explaining the Pattern

Find an issue compatible with your philosophy that a sizable fraction of the population supports but the major parties oppose. Adopt that issue, identify with it, use it to recruit support. (How to Jump-Start a Third Party)

The quote is from an old post on my blog, no longer active now that I have a Substack. It was written in the context of the comparison between the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which at the time was getting significant support, and the US Libertarian party, but I think is relevant here. Opposition to immigration was, in most of the relevant countries, a position popular with much of the electorate but one that no major party supported, hence an attractive issue for a new party. Since the immigrants being opposed are mostly Muslim and Israel’s conflicts are with Palestinian Muslims, support for Israel fits with opposition to immigration — and is also a position not supported by most of the European governments.

Abortion is not a live issue in Europe, where most countries have policies intermediate between those favored by the American right and left — restrictions on late term but not early term abortions. Most of the European countries are substantially less religious than the US, and religion is a major driver of the US anti-abortion movement. Most Europeans appear satisfied with free trade within the EU. Since trade policy with the rest of the world is determined by the EU not the individual countries, it is not a major issue in national politics. So it is not surprising that two of the major issues for the US right, abortion and protectionism, are missing from the consistent policies of the European right.

I have put the analysis in terms of policy, but there is some similarity in rhetoric. Both US and European right talk about the importance of their national culture, describe themselves as conservatives. Beyond that, however, it is hard to find consistent relations between the movements.

My View of Their Issue

My preferred immigration policy is open borders — for the laissez-faire society that is my preferred economic arrangement. The argument is weaker for a welfare state, where immigrants could come not to produce but to free ride on the present residents. The European powers have higher levels of welfare state redistribution than the US, hence better arguments for immigration restrictions. My preferred policy for both, given that they are unwilling to abandon the welfare state, is to permit immigration but not with immigrants not qualified for either welfare payments or to vote until they have lived in the country for a substantial length of time. The second half of that appears to be the policy of at least the Swedish right.

A further concern for both the European and American right is the cultural effect of large scale immigration of people from foreign cultures. For the US I find that argument unconvincing. US culture as it now exists is the product of large scale immigration from a wide variety of cultures over the past two centuries and most of our current immigration is from populations, Latin American, Chinese, and Indian, that have in the past fitted pretty well into ours.

I am less certain that I would reject it if I were a Swede, part of a small population facing substantial immigration of people from a culture in some ways hostile to theirs.

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