GLASGOW — It’s not as if everyone here in Europe in this late spring of this dangerous year is all in against the horrors of the current American president, Donald Trump.
The urges, irrational as they may be from anything like a wider world view, toward nationalism, protectionism and a certain xenophobia don’t come from nowhere.
They come from a longing for the simplicity one recalls, rightly or wrongly, from one’s youth, back when everyone looked like you, no one ever left the neighborhood and if no one was rich, no one was particularly poor, either.
Anyway, that was the Altadena neighborhood of my youth (now burned down).
Such stability and comforting sameness was also in the youth of a Glaswegian man about my age we shared a loud bar table with last night at a corner pub, the Ben Nevis, famous for its music.
Two fiddles and a guitar. Standing room only. Whisky. “Aye, none of that Famous Grouse for me,” said our table mate Colin, a semi-retired builder — what we call a contractor. “Had a bit too much of it in my youth.” He stuck to hard cider — insisting I have a swig — while his wife liked her, yeesh, vodka and Diet Coke.
We made the obligatory Yank apology for Trump, whose mother was born in Scotland and who most of the Scots despise, as I’ve learned over eight summers here.
“No, no, I rather understand the man,” said Colin. “I don’t like the changes here. The immigration. Wish we could go back to the old days. I don’t care for all these new people. Our own daughter — she’s with a Nigerian fellow. Has kids with him. Aye — a Muslim. Nice enough I suppose. I just …”
Colin got a faraway look in his eyes.
The world is changing. It’s still getting smaller. Banning the foreign students won’t make the world go away. Every cabbie, every Uber driver here has a Muslim or a Hindi name. Brexit, 10 years on, didn’t work.
Britain is edging back toward Europe and the rest of the globe after edging away. The legacy of its old empire is still with it. America, at least for the next three years, is abandoning the way we were, with cartoonish lampoons from our president about the 51st state of Canada, about taking Greenland by force, about military incursions into Mexico from our supposedly non-interventionist White House.
Our slavishly servile vice president goes to Germany and declines to meet with its elected chancellor, choosing instead to meet with the leader of the neo-fascist Alternative fur Deutschland party, whose very name, as Fintan O’Toole writes in the New York Review of Books, “references a Nazi slogan (‘Alles fur Deutschland’.)” As O’Toole notes, Trump is shredding the postwar order in favor of “a betrayal of Ukraine and open alliance with Putin,” no matter his complaints last week about the Russian dictator’s brutal drone attacks on Kyiv civilians. The president claims that the European Union was actually created in order to “screw America.” O’Toole concludes: “Trump and his circle are taking a huge gamble — that they can bring down the EU and replace it with a refurbished Russian sphere of dominance in the East and a patchwork of authoritarian nationalist states in Western and Central Europe.”
Rational political and business leaders in Europe, both traditional liberals and conservatives, are saddened and dismayed. I happened to have two dinners last week in northern Italy with a vacationing German businessman. Not exactly a political radical — he’s CEO of a large plastic company — he started our conversation by telling a joke about Trump arriving at the Pearly Gates and telling God on his throne that He’s actually sitting in his seat. Instead of denying or ignoring reality, as the president is by again pulling out of the Paris Accords, he brought up the simple fact of climate change, and said that we all must work together to slow it.
He and his family lived for five years in Cincinnati, and he loves and admires America and its can-do entrepreneurial spirit, or at least the country that he once knew. He can’t believe that we are intentionally giving up on our once influential place in the world.
“America Alone,” as O’Toole writes, “will find that isolation is not so splendid.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.