What is the European "far right" and why is the Washington Post saying those terrible things about it?

It's enough to make one yearn for "no labels."

Freaked out by the success of Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections, the Washington Post frets that Europe is lurching to the “far right.” The label “far right” appears more than 30 times in the article, but the Post never defines what the far right is or how it differs from the non-far right.

The Post thinks it knows far right when it sees it, though, and the Post sees it making major strides all over — in the Netherlands, Austria, France, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, Italy, and Argentina. Only in Poland and Spain has the far right been set back recently, according to the Post.

The Post treats what it calls the far right pretty much as a monolith. Who needs nuance when you’re a liberal journalist out to score some points?

The Post thus ignores significant differences among the parties it lumps together. For example, the Hungarian right is pro-Putin and Wilders has been too “understanding” of the Russian tyrant.

However, the Italian prime minister has backed Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. Poland, under its “far right” leaders, did too during much of the war.

In France and Finland, the far right parties have been tainted by anti-Semitism. But, as the Post admits, Israel has no stronger friend in Europe than Wilders.

Argentina’s newly elected president is a staunch free market man. That’s not true of some far right European leaders.

What, then, do the parties labeled “far right” by the Post have in common? First, as I understand it, they all want to sharply limit or end migration to their country.

But why is this a far right position? My version of the ideological spectrum has those who want to maximize individual liberty and to minimize government authority and interference at one end. At the other end are those who want maximum government control and minimize personal freedom. In other words, extreme libertarians at one end (call it the right) and communists at the other end (with fascists close by).

On this view of things, the far right would favor lots of immigration as, indeed, hard libertarians do.

But let’s put my spectrum aside. Why, using the spectrum that’s more commonly accepted, is it “far right” to limit mass migration? Barbara Jordan was considered a left-liberal. She opposed mass immigration. Similarly, socialist Bernie Sanders warned for years against mass immigration to the U.S. because he believed (correctly, I think) that the phenomenon was lowering the wages of working class Americans.

And now that illegal immigrants are flooding leftist strongholds like New York, mainstream liberal politicians are starting to balk. (Let’s remember, too, that the main groups immigrating to the U.S. share religious views and cultural values less alien to this country than the views and values of the main groups immigrating to Europe are to those nations. Therefore, European opposition to immigration is all the more understandable.)

It’s true that in recent years most Democrats balked at meaningful restrictions on illegal immigration. But was this reluctance driven by ideology or by raw politics?

I believe it was probably the latter — the desire to (1) appeal to Hispanic voters (which the Dem position on immigration may or may not have done) and (2) the desire to transform the American electorate. And it’s quite likely that Sanders’ evolution to a more welcoming stance on migration was driven by his quest to be the Democratic nominee for president, not by ideology.

In any case, standing against the disruption wrought by mass immigration and its effect on the labor market is too natural a position to be labeled “far” anything. I can accept that it’s more a conservative (or conserving) position than a liberal one, but to call it “far right” seems like a blithe attempt to dismiss a reasonable view through labeling, rather than argument.

The second position that the parties labeled far right by the Post have in common is opposition to proposals that would substantially transform the economy in response to “climate change.” Because such opposition seeks to conserve existing economic arrangements — or to limit the degree to which they are transformed — one can fairly call the opposition conservative (although I’m old enough to remember when many on the left wouldn’t have been on board, either).

But when one considers the modern left’s vision for addressing climate change, I think it’s wrong to call conservative opposition “far right.” In the U.S., that vision includes cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero in 10 years. It includes “overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

It includes eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible. It includes meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.

It also includes goals having nothing to do with protecting the environment. One of them is to “guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” Another is to “provide all people of the United States with — (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; [and] (iii) economic security.”

There’s a name for this agenda — socialism. I don’t apply this label to dismiss the agenda. Vigorously opposing it might be wise or unwise, depending on one’s ideology. But vigorously opposing it is not “far right.”

The Post gives away the game when it mourns the fact that traditional conservative parties in Europe are adopting far right positions on immigration and climate change. The Post attributes this to political opportunism. I attribute it to an understanding of how destructive mass immigration has been in Europe and how ruinous the Green New Deal vision would be if implemented.

But let’s not quibble. If non-far right parties are adopting far-right positions because they are popular, maybe this means that positions like opposition to mass immigration and the Green New Deal aren’t truly far right. If these positions are “going mainstream,” maybe they are mainstream.

And rather than being discouraged that mainstream parties are opportunistically adopting popular conservative positions, the Post, if it’s genuinely concerned about extremism, should probably be glad. After all, the embrace by mainstream parties of popular, common sense conservative positions probably offers some protection against positions that truly are extreme being swept into effect on the coattails of more reasonable ones.