Death of an 'Extremist': The assassination of Pim Fortuyn should make us think hard

National Review, June 3, 2002 by John O'Sullivan

Pim Fortuyn's assassination by an "environmental activist" in Holland, like the shaking of a kaleidoscope, produces dramatically different new patterns of politics. Together with September 11, it tells us that old political orthodoxies are breaking down and new political alliances are being formed.

Initially, the U.S. and West European media told us that we should see the assassination ambiguously, as a murder that was almost deserved because the victim was "far right," "an extremist," "ultra-right," "the Dutch Le Pen," etc. (His presumed murderer merited nothing worse than "activist.") Nor was Fortuyn alone the threat. As the Associated Press put it, his rise "mirrored a right-wing resurgence in several European countries, lately high-lighted by the anti-immigrant Jean-Marie Le Pen's surprise showing."

Within a short time, however, Fortuyn's real political opinions began to be reported (mainly via the network of libertarian and conservative web-loggers on the Internet). Pim Fortuyn, it turned out, represented the slightly oddball pacific liberalism of post-1960s Holland. He was a gay libertarian whose main deviations from Dutch orthodoxy were that he favored Thatcherite economics, wanted to subject further moves toward European integration to the sovereignty of democratic Holland, called for a halt to immigration on the grounds that high-density Holland was "full," and believed that Muslim immigrants already there should assimilate to the liberalism of Dutch society. The press had to bend him out of philosophical shape in order to make him a fascist threat. Mark Steyn parodied their efforts wonderfully with his imaginary BBC announcer declaring, "Not since the 1930s have we witnessed the disturbing spectre of so many gay professors on the march across Europe in their screamingly camp jackboots."

Exactly the same combination of oversimplification and outright falsehood could be found in the media picture of an "extreme right" resurgent throughout Europe. It is in reality a multitude of anti- establishment attitudes. The Danish "extreme right" party, for instance, wants to protect its nation's welfare state from the demographic pressures of high immigration. Le Pen may be an anti-Semite at heart, but his voters seek a crackdown on the high levels of crime, including attacks on Jews. Fortuyn wanted to preserve the ultra- tolerant liberalism of Holland (that allowed, among other things, his own recreational drug-taking and promiscuity) against the puritanism of the growing Muslim minority. And so on. None of these attitudes, however, is currently acceptable to European elites. Their articles of faith are that immigration is necessary and politically unavoidable, that opposition to Muslim immigration in particular is a far greater problem than the immigration itself, that nationalism is a backward and illiberal doctrine, and that the protest parties are simply expressions of racism and economic insecurity.

They cannot admit that human-rights liberalism and a genuine multiculturalism are incompatible and that some cultures, notably Islamic ones, reject major elements in the West's concept of human rights -- such as equality between the sexes. Underlying that inability is a failure to grasp that liberalism is itself a Western invention, or that it is part and parcel of the national identity of individual Western nations in subtly varying forms. The press treats all nationalism as incipient fascism, even though Fortuyn's patriotism incorporated Holland's tolerance of homosexuality, and a British patriot might be especially proud of the Royal Navy's suppression of the slave trade.

In short, there are such things as liberal nationalisms and nationalist liberalisms -- something incomprehensible to orthodox multicultural liberal opinion and thus increasingly dangerous to it.

As the contradictions within multicultural liberalism have become more obvious, these nationalist strains of liberalism have begun to gain ground against the dehydrated ideologies of the social- democratic/corporate-conservative establishment. And they are pushing four electoral groups -- feminists, gays, Jews, and the proletariat -- away from their traditional left allegiance toward new allies on the right. Feminists were the first to argue that Muslim values conflicted with the liberation of women as understood in the West. It is almost ten years since the British feminist writer Fay Weldon published a pamphlet attacking the idea that a multicultural West should allow such innovations as arranged marriages or a restricted education for girls. Today the presence of large Muslim communities, some supplying volunteers for the Taliban, is pushing feminists toward a recognition that Western society, however theoretically patriarchal, has many features worth defending.

Gays are moving in the same direction. In their case, economic self- interest joins a sense of cultural threat to make conservatism appealing and the bureaucratic Left much less so. As the former British Tory MP, Matthew Parris, himself gay, argued in the London Times: "Add the economic individualism which accompanies a man who has left home, plus the particular fear of violence which haunts those for whom the terrors of the school playground find their echo later in a nervousness of yobs, and you have the ingredients not only of Pim Fortuyn's free- market economics, but of his message on law and order too." Pim's politics also overlap with those of Andrew Sullivan, the former New Republic editor who has been among the most severe critics of "Islamo- fascism."