It was a good day for Europe. Standing up to Turkish threats from without and ultra-nationalist threats from within, the Dutch people stood strong and voted “no” to Steve King’s hero Geert Wilders.
One Dutch observer tweeted the news as “Wilders’ Far-right populism ends here. Holland holds the line!”
News which left John Fugelsang to quip,
“Man, I hate it when the Dutch are less authoritarian racist than my country.”
Me too, brother. Me too. Of course, the Dutch had 82 percent turnout, voting in record numbers, to our 58 percent, so there is that.
As Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert remarked,
so is this the Trump Effect? i.e. Europe looks at US shit show today and says, no thanks. https://t.co/JP3YvncqQh
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) March 16, 2017
Good call. Trump says he’s the greatest president ever and claims that after just two months of repeated golf trips, all of America’s problems he talked about on the campaign trail have gone away. Even Jesus didn’t do that.
Not sure Wilders was that crazy but now the Dutch will never have to find out. Good for them. If this is the Trump Effect, our suffering has not been in vain.
There is another way to look at it, however. Cicero Foundation’s Marcel H. Van Herpen‏ announced Wilders’ defeat this way:
“#Dutch have erected a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Freedom Party #Wilders : An example to be emulated in other countries.”
He has a point. A cordon sanitaire is, as the dictionary explains, a protective barrier around something dangerous, like a disease, or an ideology.
And that’s on page 1 of Democracy’s Big Book of Good Things. If the lesson of the United States provided an example for Dutch voters to follow, the Netherlands has provided Americans with an example as well.
Trump may have squeaked by the 2016 elections thanks to the Electoral College (and even then, just barely) but the Midterms are coming up, and Americans will have the opportunity to erfect a cordon sanitaire around the White House.
As former Independent candidate Evan McMullin reminds us, we saw Trump promote “the policies of white nationalism to chants of ‘USA! USA!'” last night, but he did it to smaller crowds.
And given the disappointing turnout in Tennessee, we can see all those folks who used to fill Trump’s arenas aren’t feeling it either. Maybe Paul Krugman is right when he says,
“Given Dutch election: maybe Trump product not of unstoppable populist wave but of media hype over email pseudo-scandal and FBI malfeasance.”
That sounds about right. We could find out. Mrs. Betty Bowers has the recipe:
“You know what would make Trump’s needy, ego-masturbation ‘You love ME!’ tours seem so small? Obama doing just one.”
So we have the Midterms coming up, but why wait till then? It would be nice to see that Obama rally held on the National Mall. You know, just to put an exclamation point on Trump’s disappointing inaugural attendance numbers.
We have to draw a line somewhere, and I can’t think of a better place to erect the cordon sanitaire than right outside the windows of the Oval Office.
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