Trump is Europeanizing America

Arresting Mahmoud Khalil only accelerates the slide to Eurotrashiness

1.

Donald Trump, quite famously, wants to Make America Great Again.

Over the weekend, he tried to do this by illegally detaining Mahmoud Khalil—a green card–holding Palestinian graduate student—for organizing various pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University.

There’s obviously going to be some chilling effects on free speech here, but it’s also likely that some of Khalil’s behavior was simply illegal. On the specifics, FIRE had (as usual) a solid take:

Disrupting college classes and harassing students is not protected expression, to be sure, and Leavitt stated that Khalil organized protests that may have done so. But the administration has not detailed Khalil’s specific actions with respect to those protests, so it remains unclear whether Khalil himself violated any campus rules against discriminatory harassment. Whether any such violation justifies detention and deportation is a separate question. In either adjudication, Khalil must be afforded due process.

That last sentence is the one I’m gonna riff off of—due process.

American due process is a fairly unique phenomenon. In the UK, it’s barely heard of, replaced with “rule of law,” which gives much more power to Parliament and far fewer assurances to the people. Geoffrey Marshall, political scientist, wrote in the 1970s about the disconnect between American and English due process:

An American constitutional lawyer might well be surprised at the elusiveness of references to the term "due process of law" in the general body of English legal writing. We all recall (dimly) its occurrence in the Petition of Right in 1628 where it is linked to "the law of the land," as it was by Sir Edward Coke, who spoke of "the process of the law" —that which is carried out "in due manner or by writ originall of the common law." Today one finds no space devoted to due process in Halsbury's Laws of England, in Stephen's Commentaries, or Anson's Law and Custom of the Constitution. The phrase rates no entry in such works as Stroud's Judicial Dictionary or Wharton's Law Lexicon.

He goes on for a little while longer describing how all the intricacies of English law add up to something almost like American due process, before basically admitting that the US just has better laws, and moving on.

It’s even worse in mainland Europe!

They don’t even have common law—instead, the only thing resembling due process is a human rights commission’s vague recommendations for how to incorporate its principles into a justice system.

This is a big part of why Hungary can get away with a totally corrupt judiciary while maintaining full EU membership.

It’s also why the French legal system involves investigating judges. These are what they say on the tin—judges that make decisions in criminal cases who are also responsible for collecting the state’s evidence in those cases. I can’t imagine that ever leading to any problems!¹

Due process is extremely important, and also very uniquely American.

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2.

Free speech also happens to be very uniquely American.

In Germany, Holocaust denial can earn you jail time. In the UK, a bad joke on Twitter will get you a visit from the police.

In the US, though, we live by maxims like “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Why such a gulf? What’s so different about the US?

Simply put: every country in Europe is an ethnostate.

Germany is the land of the Germans, France the land of the Franks, the UK the land of the English, Scottish, and Welsh (and protestant Irish), and so on.

All these European states pretend to be modern and liberal—the UK with their common law, and the mainlanders with their human rights commission—but it’s a cheap facade.

Do you know why France has investigating judges?

Napoleon!

I’m not kidding—Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor and conqueror, is responsible for an incredibly weird and very integral part of the modern French criminal justice system.

Fundamentally, France is a country dedicated to being French—not being fair or being good or anything like that. Given the choice between a sensible common law–esque system and the decidedly insane, but very French, status quo of judges raiding criminals’ homes, the French people overwhelmingly support the latter!

The United States is fundamentally different—America is not the land of the Americans! In fact, we make specific little carve-outs so the “Americans” can have ethnostates of their own (we call them “reservations,” but they really are like sovereign states in many cases), and so we can use the rest of the country for our decidedly non-ethnic national project.

Whereas Germany fundamentally wants to be German,² the US fundamentally wants to be free.

So we let people burn our flag and speak ill of our leaders and even advocate on behalf of our enemies. Because freedom matters more than America.

At least it did.

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3.

This country’s been around for 250 years now. The idea of an American identity is no longer incoherent. The idea of American nationality is becoming reasonable. You could probably make a case (albeit a bad one) for the emergence of an American ethnicity.

Trump knows all this and he loves it. He wants to take that fledgling American identity, redefine it into a cult of personality around himself, and turn us into a European-style ethnostate based on it.

I promise I’m not a crazy person, look, here are some other tacks on which this red yarn lies:

1. European ethnostates are not nearly as into immigration as America historically has been. Even after many recent refugee crises in the Middle East,³ and lots of new immigration restrictions in the US, only 9% of today’s EU population was born outside the EU vs. 14% of Americans born outside the US. Trump would really love to take us toward the European style—prioritizing Americans well above the freedoms of immigrants.

2. European ethnostates love protectionism, whereas the US has historically promoted free trade. “Trump” is basically synonymous with “tariff” nowadays.

3. European ethnostates hate economic growth and big business, whereas the US used to love giant corporations and an independent Federal Reserve. Trump is big on antitrust, and extremely small on Fed independence.

And, of course, social freedoms and due process—deeply important and unique American principles historically—are under unprecedented threat from Trump’s regime.

Remember when JD Vance went to Munich and lambasted all of Europe for their draconian suppression of free speech? He was absolutely right.

But apparently he didn’t know what his boss had in mind for us.

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4.

Richard Hanania

has two extremely-related models to explain the Trump presidency—Low Human Capital and cultiness. I think he’s right on both fronts, and I think these two features will accelerate our Europeanization.

Cultiness plays well into my prediction—while the American identity is young, it’s easy to hijack. More and more people are becoming disillusioned with the ideals our country used to be about—they blame neoliberalism and Matt Yglesias for all the world’s evils—and are searching for a spiritual guide.

Lots of Bernie bros ended up voting for Trump. Why?

Because they were voting for a guide, for a cult leader. It didn’t really matter which one—they just wanted somebody who would tell them that America was here for their benefit, not the other way around.

There’s no attitude more European: France is for the Franks, not the Franks for France. Try to suggest the opposite—try to introduce beneficial liberalizing reforms, like Macron did—and you’ll find yourself getting absolutely smoked in the next elections, like Macron was.

It’s a bit harder to see how Hanania’s theory of Low Human Capital fits my Europeanization model—we generally think of Europeans as neater, nicer, and smarter than us brash Americans. We call them “Eurotrash” because we’re jealous and insecure and so on.

But this neglects a deeper truth—they really are Eurotrash!

Europe is a mess right now, and it’s because they’re chock-full of Low Human Capital. If they weren’t, they would try to hide their ethnostatiness, because to be an ethnostate is obviously low-status. In fact, for a while, elite Europeans did deny and ignore their ethnostatiness as much as they could—liberal parties tried to open markets and borders to prove to the world that they’d finally gotten over the silly 14th-century feuds that were still driving intra-European strife. They formed the EU, pretending to set aside their ethnicities for the sake of greater political agency.

But in recent years, we’ve seen what a lie this all was. Most visibly, AfD is now the second-largest party in Germany—there’s been breathless coverage in the American media about just how gross and American these German populists are. But it’s not true.

AfD is a deeply German party with deeply German grievances that resonate deeply with German voters. The causality runs the other way—if anything, Trump and Musk have been impressed and influenced and inspired by Alice Weidel.

There’s no doubt that AfD is LHC—their voters are uneducated and anti-immigration and angry. Trump’s Europeanization will look more like becoming them than anything else.

Now, I, for one, really like living in America. I like living in a country where I have the freedom to say what I want, make as much money as I want, and buy as many foreign goods as I want. In fact, I want more people to live in this country.

Trump is an existential threat to America as we know it. This is the Land of the Free, not the Land of the American—I’d rather keep it that way.

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Lukethoughts

• “I hate people who act like they’re the divine child of whatever God they believe in and then proceeds to cherry pick from their religion. Nobody’s perfect, I get that, but don’t flaunt an idea that you’re perfect to others.” (Ed. note: I guess Luke’s saying, “don’t be phony?” That seems like good advice, sure.)

• “College admissions are funny, you can apply as many schools as you want, but you only need one to say yes.” (Ed. note: What? Is that different from other things? Jobs are the same way, so are credit cards.)

• “How do you know if you act yourself around someone? What if that someone makes you want to act better?” (Ed. note: The word “yourself” is where this thought goes wrong. I have an old write-up.)

• “I have had 4 steaks in 2 days; I’m entering ketosis.” (Ed. note: I don’t know enough biology to be sure, but there’s no way Luke’s using “ketosis” right, is there?)

1. Sarkozy tried to get rid of these guys after the horrible scandal I linked to there. He failed.

2. Germany’s kind of a weird case, to be honest. They’re definitely still an ethnostate, but have spent the last 80 years very loudly insisting that they aren’t, and taking in tons of Turkish and Syrian immigrants so they can point to them and say to the world, “See how not-ethnostate-y we are!” This is why the AfD has become so popular—they’re just finally stating what seems obvious to many Germans: that Deutschland is Land für die Deutschen.

3. It’s generally easier to cross the Mediterranean Sea than the Atlantic Ocean [citation needed].