The Counter-Jihad That Created Donald Trump
Ever since Donald Trump got elected president in 2016, there has been a long-running debate among leftists, liberals, and centrists about whether Donald Trump represents anything new under the sun. Is Donald Trump a mutation, a total deviation from the history and evolution of the Republican Party? Or is he a continuation of tendencies in the Republican Party that were lying dormant all along?
After Donald Trump got elected, the historian Rick Perlstein released a confessional New York Times Magazine essay, “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” In the essay, Rick Perlstein argued that his previous historical model for explaining the development of the American conservative movement after World War II must be completely revised, because that model had not anticipated the rise of a man like Trump or a philosophy like Trumpism taking over the Republican Party. American conservatism did not emerge organically from the intellectually respectable writings of William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater. According to Perlstein, if you wanted to depict the history of American conservatism, you didn’t study its more respectable and reasonable intellectuals; you studied ”conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.”
I respect Rick Perlstein a great deal. I have met him in person, and we are even friends on Facebook. I think he is correct that liberals are wasting their time by engaging in a largely fruitless search to look for historical examples of “reasonable conservatives” that they hope can be used to shame the shameless Trumpist conservatives of today. On the other hand, I don’t think you can say that Trump is the result of the normal evolution of the Republican Party over time.
There is something different and unique about Donald Trump, when compared to the Republican conservatives of the past, even if we have trouble articulating it. To be specific, you can see how Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party by comparing it with political parties in Europe. Before Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, the GOP more closely resembled the center-right political parties in Europe, such as the Conservative Party in the UK and the Christian Democrats in Germany. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK were so friendly and ideologically compatible in their shared hawkish, free-market conservative ideology that the British satire show Spitting Image depicted them French kissing like hormonal teenagers. The punch line was that, while in the throes of passion, Reagan had mistaken Thatcher for Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democrat prime minister of Germany.
After Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, the GOP looked less like a staid center-right conservative party and more like the far-right anti-immigrant European parties that are euphemistically referred to as “populist.” (I object to referring to these xenophobic parties unironically as “populist.” After all, aren’t immigrants people too?)
You can see how Donald Trump changed the Republican Party by looking at a New York Times article from 2019 called What Happened To America’s Center of Political Gravity. The article leans heavily on data from The Manifesto Project, an academic enterprise that collects electoral manifestos from political parties all over the world. (A “manifesto” is the more European term for what Americans call a political platform.)
When the New York Times compared all these European political parties to the Democratic and Republican parties, the Democratic Party was slightly to the right of the UK Labour Party but still to the left of the “median party” in the center, while the Republican Party was much farther right of center, with only a few extremist European anti-immigrant parties on its right flank.
Despite the party’s attempts to distance itself from its roots, the Sweden Democrats are historically linked to the neo-Nazi Nordic Realm Party. Similarly, the Freedom Party of Austria was founded by Anton Reinthaller, an SS officer who served as a Nazi member of the Reichstag. Yet, if we go by the data from the Manifesto Project, both of these parties have electoral manifestos that are more “left-wing” than the Republican Party’s platform.
How Did It Happen?
The convergence of the U.S. Republican Party with far-right, anti-immigrant parties in Europe began a few years after the 9/11 attacks, as a result of a phenomenon called the counter-jihad movement. The American branch of the counter-jihad movement began in September 2006 in the comments section of a right-wing, anti-Muslim blog called Gates of Vienna. In that comments section, regular readers of the blog decided that they need to create an organization designed to counteract both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as well as engage in counterprotests against left-wing antiwar protesters.
The name of the blog, Gates of Vienna, was a reference to the 1683 Battle of Vienna, in which the armies of Poland and the Holy Roman Empire defeated the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Anti-Muslim bloggers at the time viewed the Battle of Vienna as the conclusion of a clash between Christian and Islamic civilizations that had been going on since the start of the Crusades in the 11th century. In their view, the 9/11 attacks were simply a manifestation of the Crusades 2.0, restarted after the Ottoman Empire’s defeats in the 17th century. To the counter-jihadists, the 9/11 attacks were not anything new, but the result of the Islamic world restarting its eternal campaign to destroy the Christian civilization of the West.
The first manifestation of the counter-jihad movement called itself the 910 Group, a reference to the day before the 9/11 attacks. The group renamed itself a few times. The 910 Group first changed its name to the Center for Vigilant Freedom in 2007, but then they finally settled on calling themselves the International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA) by 2009.
The ultimate goal of the ICLA was to put American anti-Muslim activists in touch with their counterparts in Europe. As early as 2009, the ICLA began officially attending conferences of the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), an intergovernmental foreign policy agency that dates back to a 1970s-era thaw in the Cold War. These OSCE conferences proved to be crucial for the spread of the counter-jihad movement, because they enabled American right-wing activists to bond with similar far-right activists in Europe over their shared Islamophobia.
Far-right American political movements are often nationalistic and xenophobic, which would normally make forming alliances with Europeans difficult, but the counter-jihad movement changed that dynamic. The counter-jihad movement saw itself as a movement in defense of Western civilization as a whole. Anti-Muslim activists in the United States could no longer hunker down in Fortress America, but had to go overseas to defend Christian Europe.
The consequences of this strategic shift is that far-right Republican Party activists in United States developed new connections with far-right, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, which ultimately paved the way for the takeover of the GOP by Donald Trump and Trumpism. These alliances between American and European “counter-jihadists” did not fully gel until a series of activist campaigns targeting Muslim mosques beginning in 2010.
In New York City in 2010, American anti-Muslim activists began protesting against a proposal for the development of Park51, a combined mosque/Islamic community center dubbed by anti-Muslim bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert B. Spencer as “the Ground Zero Mosque,” because it was slated to be built two blocks away from the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. For a rally they organized against the proposed real estate project, Geller and Spencer invited an anti-Islamic Dutch politician Geert Wilders to give a speech denouncing the project. In addition, members of the far-right UK group, the English Defense League, traveled to New York to participate in the anti-mosque protest, wearing T-shirts that purportedly depicted shields used by Christian soldiers during the Crusades.
In 2011, members of the Tea Party joined with the U.S.-based group Youth for Western Civilization to attend a so-called “march for freedom” in Cologne, Germany aimed at preventing Muslims from building a mosque in the city. This was only two years after a controversial 2009 referendum in Switzerland that outlawed the construction of new minarets on Muslim mosques. In addition to the social ties that American Tea Party activists developed with European anti-immigrant parties like the Flemish Vlaams Belang, Youth for Western Civilization leader Taylor Rose used the 2011 march to develop ties with European far-right extremists and learn new political skills, which eventually led to the young white nationalist getting endorsed by the Montana GOP for a run for the state legislature.
The counter-jihad movement suffered a setback in 2011 when the Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik committed mass murder by detonating a van bomb that killed 8 people, as well as shooting 69 people to death at a Workers’ Youth League summer camp affiliated with the Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik wrote a manifesto justifying his actions titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” which not only went on for 1,156 pages, but also praised material from many American counter-jihadist writers, including Robert B. Spencer, Pamela Geller, Andrew Boston, Bruce Bawer, Serge Trifkovic, and a blogger with the pen name “Baron Bodissey.” Due to the connection between these counter-jihadist writers and a neo-Nazi mass murder, the counter-jihadist movement had to lay low for a while, but the damage had already been done. The social connections between American and European far-right activists that the counter-jihadist movement created had already laid the groundwork for Donald Trump transforming the GOP into a European-style far-right, anti-immigrant party just a few years later.