I was waiting for a friend in a bar when Donald Trump was convicted on all counts by a jury of his peers. Naturally, I bought the bartender a shot to celebrate – and, of course, I mentioned it on social media.
That didn’t make someone I know happy. “It’s a shame that people rejoice when a former president gets convicted. The world is laughing at us, Biden is a clown!” they wrote. “Why do you care what happens here. You live in France. You have no idea what we are going through. Gas prices, food prices, crime, 100,000 people a year dying from fentanyl, inflation. If you dislike our country, renounce your citizenship.”
For what it’s worth, Americans spend less on food as a percentage of consumer purchases than anyone else on Earth; they pay less for petrol than everyone but Indonesians, Russians, Chinese and Saudis for their gigantic, fuel-guzzling vehicles; inflation in the US peaked at 9% in 2022, while inflation in the euro area peaked at 10.6%; and violent crime in the US plummeted in the first months of 2024 – although Trump’s 34 felony convictions have surely sent the crime rate of ex-presidents to all-time highs.
But as most of us know, trying to change someone’s perception with facts is a relatively pointless endeavour. What’s more worth talking about is that so many of the far right’s supporters claim to be “patriots”, while in reality hating almost everything about what their countries really are.
The rule of law? They support the justice system when it convicts their enemies, but discredit it when it convicts their idols. Free and fair elections? They – including supreme court justices! – only believe in the results when their candidates win. Some will even go to almost any lengths to excuse an attempted coup d’état, the rioters who trashed the Capitol and contributed to the death of a police officer, and the criminal who incited them to do it.
American cities? They’re convinced those are crime-ridden, “horrible” places. Natural beauty? Down with the environmental regulations meant to preserve it, and “Drill, baby, drill”.
They hate the liberal world order their country built after the second world war – the international institutions it designed, the international treaties it signed and the defensive alliance it belongs to. They hate the idea of paying taxes to provide for common welfare for their fellow citizens, in large part because they hate the demographic reality of their country as it is.
What, exactly, is the America they “love” but a (lily-white) ghost?
European voters are not quite as far gone as their American counterparts. In France, the far-right National Rally (RN) is attempting to obscure the extremeness of its core to garner electoral success, whereas Trump is successively more deranged with promises of purges, exhortations that the military should be loyal to him alone, and musings about serving multiple terms beyond the constitutional limits.
But the essence of what they are selling is the same: a story of our own weakness disguised as a recipe for “control” in a world that can feel like it is spinning in all directions.
So weak that our societies risk being submerged and dominated by those seeking asylum and refuge. Too weak to integrate immigrants – even though the past 150 years of French history has been a story of just that, and so successfully that the story of Armenian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German immigration is barely told (perhaps it should be told more regularly and more intentionally).
We’ve been bullied into submission, they claim. We’re victims of the European Union, of professors steeped in le wokisme, and of the green agenda. We’re weak, weak, weak, but they, of course, will make us strong (again).
This is not the mindset of the strong; it is the wild ego that results from deep insecurities. What else to expect from a party that despite now downplaying its history of promoting closer ties with Vladimir Putin, has financed itself via Kremlin-connected banks, and speaks of its plans to subvert democracy?
Does anyone else find this pathetic? This argument that our societies are “the greatest ever”, but at the same time too weak to meet the enormous challenges of our time? Too weak to talk honestly about our own history? That anything less than being worshipped by the rest is evidence of utter decline?
It is little surprise that the RN is fielding candidates who, as Libération alleges, display beliefs and conspiracy theories that have no place in a modern democracy. Some civilisations “simply stayed beneath bestiality in the chain of evolution,” said Marie-Christine Sorin, an RN candidate in the south-west. Sophie Dumont, who is running in the Burgundy region, has shared comments accusing Ukraine of being “the largest supplier of children to pedophile networks”. Françoise Billaud, who joined the National Front, the precursor to the National Rally, in the 1980s, has paid homage to Philippe Pétain and other Nazi collaborators.
Destruction is far easier than creation, and these are people who are incapable of creating anything. France should know this: it built postwar reconciliation with Germany, the European Union and a Europe without internal borders because it believed in its own creative potential, not in its insurmountable weakness.
And also because it was led by an ideological vision with its heritage in resistance, not collaboration. The RN’s DNA lies elsewhere, of course. In the anti-Dreyfusards, and the collaborationism of Pétain and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, rather than in the France that refused to let the idea of the république die – even if that meant linking hands with others elsewhere. There are those who love their countries enough to move from acknowledgment to progress, and those who don’t, and so they remain in shame-based denial. “Nationalist” is a label they own. But patriot? Not in my book.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
