Sunday Scribblings

European Thoughts in an American Week

Age brings a certain perspective. In two weeks’ time, I will be 74. In the words of Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny:

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Even if I can’t say where the time went, I have learnt one thing over those years when it was “slip sliding” away.

Life goes on. Even when it does not go on the way you might have liked it to go on. It goes on, nonetheless. Sometimes, our hopes just end up in disappointment. Other times, our worst fears turn out to be as bad as we thought, perhaps even worse, but we always have the capacity to come back, to find light in the darkness. Because there is always light. Even when the darkness is at its darkest.

Numbers

I got up at 05:00, French time, last Wednesday morning to see what was happening in the US presidential election. One look at my computer screen and I knew it was all over. With 74 years on the clock, and having been interested in politics all my life, I knew Donald Trump would again be elected president of the US. I went off to do other things. Not for me to obsess over whether some obscure demographic in some obscure US state might turn things around.

Francis Fukuyama in the Financial Times described it as a “blowout victory”. It was a free and fair election. Trump won, and by some margin. Harris and the Democrats lost. The Republicans also took the Senate. It is already a Republican Supreme Court. As I write this, it also looks like the House will be Republican.

The Trump majority can, in theory, write – or unwrite – any laws it wants. Will the filibuster survive in the Senate?

However, have a look at these numbers.

2020 Biden Trump

81,283,500 74,223,975

2024 Harris Trump

70,356,521 74,264,010

These are the available figures at the time of writing. The final figures may be different, but not the order of magnitude.

Trump’s 2024 vote compared to his 2020 vote was more or less the same. Harris dropped 11 million Biden votes. Before anyone tells me, I know things are not static and that there were switchers in both directions. Nonetheless, these numbers hit you in the face like a wet towel.

As a matter of interest, in 2016 Hilary Clinton got 66m votes. Trump got 63m, but became President because of the peculiarities of the “Electoral College”.

Maybe “MAGA” is not such a wave as people think. But, as I say below, it is probably best that Europeans do not over-speculate on the shifting nature of US politics.

The Return of Trump

Now, it will come as no surprise to readers of these Scribblings if I say that I am not a Trump devotee. I am what I have been since I first joined the Irish Labour Party in 1968, a European social market social democrat. Someone who believes in the market economy, but a market economy working within a framework of rules that smooths out its rough edges and offers everyone the chance of a decent life. A solid floor but no ceiling. Rise as high as you want, but if you fall it will not be to stony ground.

So, this week’s Scribblings offer some European thoughts prompted by the return of Trump.  

First, most European commentators who write about US politics really know little about US politics. Some have visited on holidays. Some might even have lived there for a few years. But they are not Americans and do not think like Americans. Their European mindset creeps into what they write. This means they often get things wrong or see things as they want to see them. Caution when writing about the US is advised.

Second, as Europeans understand it, there is no “right” and “left” in US politics. Everyone in America is a capitalist, even the working class. I think it may have been Samuel Gompers, a major labour union leader at the turn of the last century, who when asked what unionists wanted, replied “more”. Strikers at Boeing bore that out. If they were on strike for a principle, they’d still be out. It was just a question of how much was enough.  You can’t get more capitalist than that.

Now, to be fair to Gompers, when he was asked what he wanted, he replied that labour wanted more schools, more houses, more work, and more justice. But it was the word “more” that stuck and  allowed the employer-side spin doctors of the day to frame labour as wanting “more, more, more and more.” Be careful how you say things.

“More” stuck. and US unions came to be seen as bargaining organisations pushing for plenty more, and not as social justice warriors.

When US unions call a strike, they call a strike. Boeing workers have just been out for six weeks. Not for them the French practice of a “Beaujolais and a Baguette” for a two-hour lunchtime walkout.

The American “Left”

The American “left” is less about economics and pay packets, and more about “critical theory” and liberation struggles in other lands.

I am not dismissing critical theory. We need to understand how power is structured and exercised in our societies if we want to change things. But practical political strategies are best not driven by the writings of some dead academic who would want to know that while the strategy is working in practice, would it work in theory?

Nor do I dismiss the fight of peoples in other lands for the right to be free. How could I? I am Irish. After the US, we were the first to break free from the British Empire. By bloody means, starting at Easter in 1916.

But we should not uncritically support any group or movement that proclaims itself a liberation movement. As the Taliban in Afghanistan did. Who wants to live in a society where, in the name of religion, women are made to be invisible and all their rights and freedoms are suppressed? Just because someone has a gun and a slogan and say they hate “US imperialism” does not make them part of the Left. Many of these people are our enemies, not our friends.

The point I want to make is this. While these issues may be the burning concerns of deeply committed activists, those activists constitute a small, very small, tiny indeed, number of voters. Not just in the US, but in European countries as well.

These issues are not the burning concerns of the 99% of voters who worry about the dollar or the euro in the pocket and what it buys. About inflation. Their everyday lives. I mentioned the Boeing workers earlier. Before the strike, the real value of their pay had increased by a meagre 4% over the previous 14 years. They are not alone in seeing their living standards freeze as others grew extremely rich.

For those who depend on a weekly or monthly pay cheque, if that cheque is not growing, then all the statistics in the world count for nothing. And you will vote for someone who says he or she can make it grow. If that involves protectionism, tariffs, closing borders, and deportations you are not going to be too concerned. Former Communist voters in the north of France where I live now vote for Marine le Pen because that is what she offers them. Georges Marchais, the former French Communist leader, if he were still alive, would find a lot in common with Donald Trump.

Social democracy should be rooted in the lives of working people. Times to rediscover those roots.

Immigration

And, it has to be said, American voters are concerned about seemingly uncontrolled, illegal immigration, especially at the Southern border.

America is a land of immigration. It always was. We Irish know that only too well. We have been one of the great beneficiaries of the “boat to America”. There are many families in Ireland who only got by over the years because of what was sent back from New York or Chicago.

And let’s be honest. We Irish have not always been scrupulous about moving to the US legally. How many thousands of young Irish people were there illegally in the 1980s, as the Irish economy struggled? But it is easier to be an “illegal” when you are white than when the colour of your skin is darker.

To be honest, I know little about American demographics. But from what I do know, America needs immigrants to fill labour gaps across its economy. From top talent down to farm workers picking fruit and vegetables.

Throughout history, all societies have had a fear of the “outsider”, the “other” and have sought to close ranks to protect themselves against “alien influences”. It has rarely worked in the long term, even if in the short term “political entrepreneurs” have built successful personal careers pushing nativist protectionism.

But that “nativist protectionism” runs up against economic necessity. The reality for most Western European countries is that without immigration, we are slowly going to disappear by simply dying out. And while we are dying out, we will have very grim politics as generations fight among themselves over dividing an ever-smaller economic pie. If you can read French, have a look at Le Grand Vieillissement by Maxime Sbaihi on the ageing of French society and the problems it will throw up.

It seems to me that without immigration, and significant immigration at that, European economies and societies will crash and crash soon. There are two reasons for this. One, people are living longer as a result of advances in medical science and general improvements in living standards. Some older people are in great shape. But many require care and that care needs to be given by people.

At the other end of the spectrum, young couples are simply not having enough children. It is estimated that the replacement rate is somewhere around 2.2 children per family, the 0.2 allowing for the fact that, not every child makes it to adulthood and for the fact that some people are childless.

Across Europe, replacement rates are well below 2.2. according to the European Commission:

In 2022, 3.88 million babies were born in the EU, a slight decrease from 4.09 million in 2021. The number of children born in the EU has been declining since 2008, when 4.68 million children were born. 

The total fertility rate in 2022 was 1.46 live births per woman in the EU, which is another decline, after the small increase recorded in 2021 (the total fertility rate was 1.53 in 2021 and 1.51 in 2020). here

The twin European challenges then are how we manage an increasingly ageing population with a workforce that is in long-term decline because of a falling birth rate.

Of course, there is some work that new technologies will take care of but the idea that AI will solve all our problems is simply not true. Maybe someday a robot will cut your hair, but I am not sure that there are many who would want to volunteer to have that done just now.

But the economic imperative of migration runs into the brick wall of nativist protectionism. Not least because potential immigrants will be people of different skin colour, and with different cultural and religious values from those of “White Christian Europeans”. Have a look at the slate of candidates for the incoming European Commission and point out to me all the Non-White Christian Europeans. They may not be practising Christians, but that is their cultural inheritance.

We also need to ask if it is right that we strip developing countries of their best and brightest because those are the ones who will move. My answer is that the choice to move is theirs, and that if they want to come to us and contribute to our societies then they should be welcomed.

But it cannot be a free-for-all. Migration into our societies must be managed and controlled. This means proper legal channels through which people can apply, Including those claiming asylum. To borrow a human resources phrase, we also need better “inboarding” processes and procedures to integrate those who choose to join us.

Does this mean that we must say “no” to some? Yes, it does. But then we also need to work with those countries from which migrants might come to help them develop their societies and economies.

Some Final Thoughts – For Now

I am a “bread and butter” social democrat. I came out of Dublin working class poverty, even if those days are very long behind me. We need to remember that we have to deliver for “pay cheque” workers, those whose only income is their weekly or monthly pay packet. Not that they might not have a few euros put away for a rainy day, but if they lost their job they would have a problem.

We need to deal with “cultural” issues as well. But if we do not deal with the “bread and butter” issues first then others will.

That is what Trump did.

We need to develop a new social democratic “social contract” for today’s world. No easy task. Something I will come back to in future Scribblings.