Michael Shellenberger@shellenberger
Over the last decade, Western media, academics, and policymakers have understandably viewed right-wing nationalist victories as temporary aberrations soon to be corrected. After Britons voted to leave the European Union in June 2016 and Americans elected Donald Trump that November, prominent commentators predicted a swift return to deepening globalization. And indeed, Europe extended its globalist project.
The United Kingdom’s globalist Conservative governments allowed net migration to rise to a record 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, more than four times pre-Brexit levels. Those same Conservatives passed a “net zero” emissions by 2050 into law in 2019, accelerated subsidies for offshore wind, and failed to tap North Sea oil and gas, even as energy bills climbed. And conservative ministers adopted World Health Organization guidance for Covid lockdowns, masking, and vaccination, and they expanded gender self-identification guidance in English schools.
German and French establishment parties enforced a cordon sanitaire or firewall against the “far-right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Rassemblement National (RN) parties, denying them coalition partners and most mainstream coverage, and American voters in 2020 elected Joe Biden, who reversed Trump’s border policies and rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office. Biden restored Obama-era diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks across the federal bureaucracy and revived federal pressure on social media companies to remove disfavored speech.
But then, the reelection of Donald Trump in November 2024 dashed those hopes. Trump returned to power on promises to seal the southern border, deport illegal immigrants, end the electric vehicle mandate, withdraw from the Paris accord, and dismantle federal censorship of social media.
Within hours of taking office, he signed an executive order banning federal involvement in online censorship and stripped the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its role in policing so-called misinformation.
Vice President JD Vance told a stunned Munich Security Conference audience in February 2025 that “the threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within.” In February 2025, Trump called the European Union an “atrocity” and announced new tariffs.
Democrats may yet retake the White House in 2028 and one or both chambers of Congress in this fall’s midterms. The Trump administration’s war with Iran, which began on February 28, 2026, has triggered the largest oil supply shock on record, rising gasoline prices, and a potential recession. Trump’s net approval rating sits at minus 23 points with 60% disapproving and 37% approving. California Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a balanced $350 billion budget last week and called Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “dumb and dumber” as he positioned himself for a 2028 run. And both Newsom and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Munich Security Conference in February, implicitly responding to Vance, with Newsom telling the audience, “Donald Trump is temporary. He’ll be gone in three years.”
And the globalists are fighting back in Europe. European Commission officials in Brussels are tightening their censorial grip on the digital public square through the Digital Services Act and a “Democracy Shield” program to demand censorship of the Right ahead of upcoming elections. In Britain, Labor leadership challengers Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have openly called for the United Kingdom to rejoin the European Union. Streeting formally launched his leadership bid in May 2026 by calling Brexit “a catastrophic mistake” and saying “Britain’s future lies with Europe, and one day back in the European Union.” And France’s Marine Le Pen lost her right to run for the 2027 presidency on March 31, 2025, when a Paris court convicted her of embezzling EU funds and immediately barred her from public office for five years.
But right-wing nationalists are not far from taking power in major European capitals.
In Britain, the right-wing Reform UK party gained more than 1,400 seats in the May 7, 2026, local elections, while Labor lost more than 1,300 seats and the Conservatives lost over 500. Ninety-seven Labor MPs last week called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign. Seventy percent of British respondents told YouGov in May 2026 that Starmer was performing “poorly.”
In France, Jordan Bardella of the RN leads in the polls for the 2027 presidential election with 35 - 37.5% support, with Marine Le Pen close behind at 34% before her ban. President Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating fell to 11% in late 2025, the lowest the Verian polling firm had ever recorded.
And in Germany, the AfD leads national polling at 29% against the center-right CDU/CSU’s 22%, the Greens’ 14%, and the SPD’s 12% as of mid-May 2026. Berlin polls now put the AfD in second place behind the CDU, a position once considered politically impossible in the capital.
And mainstream conservative parties are already moving to the right on migration and climate. German Chancellor and CDU leader Friedrich Merz passed a non-binding migration motion in January with AfD support, breaking a seventy-five-year taboo against cooperating with the “far right.” Merz adopted much of the AfD’s migration language during his campaign, promising to turn migrants away at the border and to accelerate deportations. The cordon sanitaire that excluded the right has cracked, and the political center of gravity in Germany, and in much of Europe, has shifted toward the very positions that establishment leaders spent a decade demonizing.
The implications for Europe, NATO, and the broader Western order are massive. NATO’s basic premise rests on a shared American and European commitment to defending an open liberal order, but Vance told European leaders in Munich that US support would depend on whether they honored free speech and democratic legitimacy, which they have not done. Tariffs and trade disputes between Washington and Brussels have replaced the steady tariff reductions that defined the postwar order.
And the institutions that defined the transatlantic system since 1945, including NATO, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the United Nations climate accords, the World Economic Forum, and the European Union itself, are weaker than ever. Meanwhile, historic US support for maintaining open shipping lanes and Taiwan appears to be weakening.
For nearly a decade, the legacy media and progressive activists demonized Trump, Farage, Bardella, and Weidel as fascists or Nazis bent on destroying democracy. President Biden in 2022, speaking against a blood-red backdrop at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, declared that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” Yet today those same figures are governing or on the verge of governing major Western nations and cities.
The question is why. Why did nationalism return? Why did the globalist consensus that ruled the West from 1945 to 2024 collapse so quickly? And why are right-wing nationalists winning despite sustained attacks from the establishment?
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