“Those Europeans who shake their heads in disbelief at President-elect Trump and his success would do well to consider things, including themselves, from an American and, even more so, a global point of view.”
While Americans have lived every day with the consequences of the Biden presidency, Europeans have felt these as a more remote matter, even though they are nearer to one of them, namely the war still being waged on Europe’s eastern doorstep. This remoteness makes many of them incredulous that Donald Trump is back, and back with a vengeance. The things that so many Europeans do not understand about President-elect Trump could in fact, if written down, fill a five-volume set, but here I should like to concentrate on three things, with the first two being closely related: Europe’s post-historical nature, its moral purism, and its relative lack of positive visions. I shall treat them in this order.
As I have written in various contexts, all of Europe except the east has been off the geopolitical stage of storm and stress for many decades now. I will not repeat here the full point about Europe that I have made from the point of view of the philosophy of history, but suffice it to say that European countries have ceased to be great, historical powers, and, this being the case, that Europe’s influence on world events is minimal. As a result, Europeans have forgotten that politics is, in its most heightened form, a matter of life and death. While no one in Teheran or Beijing particularly cares who sits in the Riksdag in Stockholm, or even in the Paris Elysée or Bundestag in Berlin, who sits in the White House in Washington, D.C. makes an enormous difference, since America is at an earlier historical stage than Europe and is still a great power. While I, like many, considered the former President’s victory the likelier outcome, I was still nervous about the possibility of an upset by Vice President Kamala Harris, and a German friend of mine told me to relax, saying that, after all, it’s “only politics.” And I pointed out to him that in his country, politics is indeed only politics, while in mine politics is a matter of life and death around the world, reminding him that because President Trump lost in 2020, Russian forces were encroaching upon eastern Europe, with deaths well in excess of a hundred thousand, over a thousand Jews were slaughtered in Israel, and Afghan women were enslaved and Afghan gays stoned to death.
That is, many Europeans, because they themselves no longer exercise world influence, have forgotten that the world needs a strong America to hold things together. Having forgotten this, it is easy to concentrate on lesser things, such as Trump’s sometimes crude jokes or other seemingly offensive remarks. (Personally, I find very little of what the man has ever said offensive, and I think we have grown far too sensitive, but that is a discussion for another time.) Worrying about a leader’s meanness or gruff ribaldry is a luxury that post-historical peoples have, historical ones not. But if Europeans—and the segments of the American left who think as they do—were to remember what is actually at stake in American elections, they would understand that a rambunctious tough-guy type is far preferable for America and the world, even for Europeans themselves, than is an insecure woman whose weakness was matched only by her monumental cluelessness and obvious lack of intelligence. So when my European friends go to vote, they vote for marginally lower tax rates and, in vain, for reducing the speed at which new mosques are being built in their countries. When I go to vote, I vote for peace in Europe; I vote for stability in the Middle East; and I vote for the hemming in of China’s imperialistic ambitions.
This stark difference for the world—and also, for that matter, for domestic American politics—based on who controls the American presidency should also be a reminder for the conspiracy theorists, both Left and Right, who think that the deep state or “blob” run absolutely everything, and that the American president just takes orders from global monied interests. While these no doubt exercise great influence—and here Europeans have an even more valid complaint than Americans —and while I hope President-elect Trump’s efforts to cut down the deep state will be successful, to pretend that the president himself does not decide major questions of life and death is ridiculous.
Related to the post-historical factor is that of moral purism. Being post-historical and having little geopolitical responsibility, because of a dearth of geopolitical power, make moral purism not only tempting—it is always tempting, since it feeds our vanity—but the actual norm. Just as everyone judges historical actions from the advantage of hindsight, not having to confront the stress and uncertainty that the historical actors had to face in their moments of decision, so too post-historical peoples are able to point at powerful contemporary geopolitical actors and tell them what is right and good. But those who have real responsibility tend to understand that moral purism is impractical. President Joe Biden does not understand this, which is part of the reason why the world during his presidency has grown increasingly chaotic. President-elect Trump, on the other hand, in ending the war in Ukraine—which he will—understands that, while moral purism may dictate that Russia is an evil imperialistic aggressor and should be pushed back, only practicality can bring peace to eastern Europe. To resolve a stalemate that is increasingly tilting in Russia’s favor, the matter can be acceptably solved only by a peace agreement that on the one hand will leave our moral urges unsatisfied, but that on the other hand will render the world less chaotic. Implicit in such an agreement will be the notion that might does, up to a point, make right, because Russia will, through brute force, have achieved some territorial gains. But acknowledging that such is the world in which we live is part of bringing about peace, and a practical leader like Trump will make such an outcome possible, while post-historical and morally purist Europeans complain that such an agreement is tantamount to rewarding a brutal dictator, and they would rather see continued death and destruction than leave their thirst for moral superiority unquenched.
Moral purists will do a lot of hand-wringing over this or that moral conundrum, and, as the case may be, this is sometimes understandable. But practicality has a different mind. It understands that, sometimes, negotiation with brutal men is necessary, and, sometimes, overwhelming power and the suffering of innocents is necessary, in order to achieve peace or stability. Europeans can easily point fingers and say that such-and-such would be better and accuse Trump of callousness or cruelty, while the reality that always rests on the shoulders of a world leader with actual power—not to mention on the shoulders of those in the actual heat of battle—will dictate more clearly that, as always, Machiavelli was right. Moral purism feels good; it is a type of drug, a luxury item that men with responsibility cannot afford.
A final thing Europeans do not understand about President-elect Trump, and about American conservatism more broadly, is its positive vision. Contemporary European conservatism is more reactionary and less rooted in something positive, in no small part because religion is so much weaker in Europe, even, by and large, among conservatives. When one listens to many conservatives in western and northern Europe, they so often—understandably enough—focus on the Islamization of their countries, their societies growing less recognizable, and on resisting overbearing legislation from the European Union bosses in Brussels. These are worthwhile causes, of course, but they often come at the expense of formulating positive visions of the world and of what a better society looks like, such as through the embrace of family, faith, and local communal bonds. Such concerns often seem dangerously nativist to squeamish Europeans, and a genuine belief in Jesus as the anointed son of God will draw amused smiles even in many conservative circles. Although President-elect Trump himself is no typical conservative in the religious sense, the American conservative movement that he, justifiably or not, has come to represent, does not suffer from this squeamishness. Rather, it unabashedly proclaims what it holds true—it proclaims America’s superiority to the rest of the world, it is proudly armed, and with positive naïveté it raises the cross for all to see. And this is in fact, willy-nilly, inspiring to people. And so Europeans fail to see that it is precisely the unabashed and positive triumphalism characterizing Trump and American conservatism more broadly that can achieve the results that some Europeans themselves desire but do not know how to bring about. This authenticity or unvarnished honesty is something that Americans love and so many Europeans fail to comprehend. President-elect Trump happens to intuitively understand the truth of one of my favorite lines from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (vol. 2, part 2, ch. 4), that “They [the rich] voluntarily give to the people, but they wish to continue to keep them at a distance. They believe that this is enough; they are mistaken…It is not the sacrifice of their money that the people demand from them, but of their pride” (my translation). Trump openly brags about his wealth, and lower-class Americans are fine with that; they love him because he speaks to them forthrightly—in other words, because he treats them with respect. This is in stark contrast to almost every Democrat (and even many Republican, not to mention European) major politicians, not least Trump’s opponent in the recent election.
European conservatism does have one advantage vis-à-vis its American counterpart, namely that the latter has liberalism baked into it in a way that the European variety does not. America was founded on rebellion against the king, and on the Declaration of Independence which itself has liberalism in its opening wording. That is, a European conservative sentiment like “For king and country” has no strength in the United States. And so European conservatism is technically capable of being more conservative than American, and one sometimes sees this in small conservative pockets in Europe. European conservatism can thus potentially be very deep, but is very narrow in its reach on the continent, while American conservatism must necessarily be shallower but is on the other hand far broader in its reach.
But even though European conservatism has this theoretical depth that is unavailable for American conservatives, who are more liberal for the reasons stated, the latter are much more successful in their battle for recruits, due to their embrace of a clearly defined, positive world-view. While Europeans have a deeper well available from which to draw in their combat against left-wing and Islamic encroachment, they have evolved too far away from the, in their eyes, childish and naïve behavior of someone like Trump, not realizing that so much of his success, not just in terms of elections but also in terms of executed policy, stems precisely from that which they deplore—the cutting of the Gordian knot of propriety, accepted custom, and geopolitical niceties.
Those Europeans who shake their heads in disbelief at President-elect Trump and his success would do well to consider things, including themselves, from an American and, even more so, a global point of view. Remembering the factors I have discussed—the post-historical nature of their condition, their moral purism, which is undergirded by so many unexamined philosophical premises, and their lack of concretely defined positive visions for the future—would make them better understand, even if not always agree with, the phenomenon of Donald Trump and why he, and the America he will soon again lead, act the way they do.
Benedict Beckeld is a philosopher based in New York City. His most recent book is Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations, from Cornell University Press. He can be found on X @BenedictBeckeld
