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Thom's blog
The Big Difference between the European and American Right
If you were to ask most Americans what the word "conservative" stands for, they'd probably tell you that it stands for someone who believes in small government.
When comes to the U.S., that definition of conservative is actually spot on.
That's because today in America, the main goal of the Republican Party - the political party of American conservatives - is to weaken government so that corporations and billionaires can write the rules of the game.
As Grover Norquist once said, what American conservatives want to do is "get [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Most people assume that this is the case in Europe as well. But while it's arguably true for the United Kingdom, it's not true for rest of the continent. And if you look at the platforms of the biggest European far-right parties you'll find something astonishing: they could care less about drowning government in a bathtub. All they really care about is hating immigrants.
Take France's National Front, for example, which is led by Marine Le Pen and polls anywhere between 10 and 16 percent every presidential election cycle. Like the Republican Party here in the U.S., the National Front wants to clamp down on immigration and "secure the border."
But the similarities end there.
Unlike the American far-right, the National Front actually wants to protect the social safety net. Yes, it only wants to protect it for white French people, but that's still very different than what the Republican Party wants to do here in America, which is slash everyone's social security and welfare benefits.
A similar situation exists in Greece, where the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party is the leading far-right group. Like the National Front in France, Golden Dawn is all about hating immigrants. And just like the National Front and unlike the American Republican Party, it violently opposes austerity.
The same is also true of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Led by the controversial Geert Wilders - who, by the way, gives Donald Trump some strong competition for the title of wildest political hair - the Party for Freedom is basically all about keeping Muslims out of the Netherlands and saving the welfare state.
So why is it that none of the European hard right parties are talking about shrinking the size of the government?
-Thom
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