It’s not your father’s leftism — though it may be your great-grandfather’s. With the leftist Social Democrats poised to take power in today’s Danish election, it normally would be a time for the immigrationist/internationalist/multiculturalist types to celebrate. Not this time, however. Oh, the Social Democrats’ leader, Mette Frederiksen (shown), is a leftist.
But she also takes a hard line on immigration — and on Muslim immigrants.
It’s another sign that immigrationism — the irrational belief that immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned, and must be the one constant in an ever-changing universe of policy — is on the wane in Western Europe.
As the Irish Times reports, “Tacking left on welfare and right on immigration looks likely to pay off for Denmark’s Social Democrats, who are widely expected to return to power this week as voters desert the centre-right government and the far right.”
“A poll this weekend predicted the centre-left party, led by Mette Frederiksen, will be the country’s largest with about 27 per cent of the national vote after the election on Wednesday [polls close at 2 pm EDT], while the ‘red bloc’ of left-leaning parties it leads is on course for more than 55 per cent,” the paper continues.
As for the 41-year-old Frederiksen’s anti-immigrationism rhetoric, the Guardian tells us:
“For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” she said in a recent biography.
Denmark’s current right-wing coalition government last year enacted the most anti-immigration legislation in Danish history and, rather than position her party in stark opposition, Frederikson [sic] has embraced much of it.
Under her leadership, the SD [Social Democrats] have called for a cap on “non-western immigrants”, for asylum seekers to be expelled to a reception centre in North Africa, and for all immigrants to be forced to work 37 hours a week in exchange for benefits.
But it is the government policies her party has supported or failed to oppose which have been most alarming for her allies in the left-of-centre red bloc. The Social Democrats voted in favour of a law allowing jewellery to be stripped from refugees, and a burqa and niqab ban, and abstained rather than voted against a law on mandatory handshakes irrespective of religious sentiment at citizenship ceremonies, and a plan to house criminal asylum seekers on an island used for researching contagious animal diseases. In February, she backed what the DPP has branded a “paradigm shift” — a push to make repatriation, rather than integration, the goal of asylum policy.
The last goal, do note, is actually what “asylum” was meant to be. The idea is that you grant the genuinely imperiled safe haven until the danger in their native land has passed; then they’re repatriated. It’s much as when, let’s say, you open your doors to an abused woman. Generally speaking, do you assume she’ll eventually return to her place once the abuser is gone? Or do you adopt her?
In fact, the main reason the West has been “adopting” Third World migrants for ages now is that the globalist Left long ago discovered they’re reliable voters and can be used to break down national sovereignty. It’s not compassion but power that mainly drives today’s immigrationism.
This is yet another reason why, more than once bitten and twice shy and wary, wise observers would wonder whether Frederiksen’s anti-immigrationist talk is heartfelt reality or merely rhetoric. That said, if she’s faking it, she certainly has gone almost all in.
After all, she “has called Islam a barrier to integration, said some Muslims ‘do not respect the Danish judicial system’, that some Muslim women refuse to work for religious reasons, and that Muslim girls are subject to ‘massive social control,’” the Guardian reported in 2018. “She has also called for all Muslim schools in the country to be closed.”
But whether she’s sincere or not, a leftist singing such a tune reflects a seismic European political shift. “Where are all the leaders?” is generally the wrong question, as I often say. A better one is “Where are all the followers” — and the followers have changed.
Seeing the ravages of immigrationism — the burgeoning crime; the no-go zones; the ethnic and religious chauvinism; the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish attacks; the rape gangs; and, in general, how not everyone is assimilable — has soured people on the belief. Yet there’s more.
When Hungary and Poland unabashedly rejected immigrationism, it helped start a trend. Italy and Austria soon after followed the lead, and this catalyzed an emotional change. It’s not so much that people began thinking explicitly, “If these European nations can resist immigration, why can’t we?” (though this no doubt occurred to some extent).
It’s that, like it or not, people follow people more than ideas — more even, lamentably, than ideas that happen to be true. Humans are social beings, creatures of the flock, and thus are highly influenced by social pressure. Up until recently, all that pressure militated in favor of immigrationism. “You’re a bigot, a ‘racist,’ a xenophobe, and generally a bad person if you oppose immigration!” was the idea.
That’s changing. The pseudo-elite dam of immigrationist illusion is breaking. It’s increasingly socially acceptable to oppose immigration and, in particular, the Third World variety. In fact, should Europe continue on this cultural trajectory, one day soon the immigrationists may be stigmatized via scorn, ostracism, and name-calling (“traitor” comes to mind).
Speaking of which, branding patriotic Europeans opposed to immigration “far right,” as is the mainstream media’s wont, was always puerility or propaganda, mainly because there is no viable Western European “far right,” at least insofar as being traditional goes. I doubt there’s one prominent anti-immigrationism, Western European politician — whether it’s France’s Marine Le Pen, Holland’s Geert Wilders, or someone else — who isn’t by and large a secular statist. Why, anti-immigrationist Dutch leader Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002 and often called “far right,” was an openly homosexual, socially liberal, former sociology professor who opposed Muslim migration because it threatened Holland’s liberal social model.
In fact, Social Democrat Danish MP Peter Hummelgaard states that the anti-immigrationist stance is simply a return to his party’s roots. “We have become more aligned with many of the voters who we are made to represent, and who we became alienated from over the past 25 years,” the Guardian quotes him as saying.
But it’s in reality a return to man’s roots. The historical norm is to keep unassimilable foreign elements out of your civilization, not invite them in. After all, many peoples have been overrun, subsumed, and even extinguished, such as the Ainus in Japan or the Formosan aborigines. But they never invited their cultural destruction via an organized immigration model, yelling all the while “Our strength lies in our diversity!”
In the final analysis, Frederiksen and her Social Democrats may or may not mean a word they say, and their economic and social leftism is no healthy prescription. Nonetheless, European immigrationism does appear to be dying, and that is a cause for celebration, indeed.
Photo of Mette Frederiksen: AP Images
