U.S. moves from darkness into the light, say the Dutch

 

Thomas von der Dunk

The culture wars in the Netherlands are over, and we just don’t get what the fuss is about on the other side of the Atlantic.

“The contrast between the coming and the leaving man could hardly be bigger,” wrote Dutch cultural historian Thomas von der Dunk of the inauguration of Barack Obama.  ”[T]he zealous cosmopolitan versus the provincial slacker who got everything for free and didn’t make anything of it.”  It was hardly the first time Von der Dunk fired a cheap shot at George W. Bush or the Republicans in general.  Past October, he wrote: “For Christian and Islamic fundamentalists it is much worse when men fuck each other than when they kill each other.  Just because of the sick state of mind behind such a moral, we may pray that [Sarah] Palin will never end up in the White House.”

Von der Dunk, needless to say, is a rather talentless, frustrated crank, who’s had a disappointing academic career and now writes 400-word columns for left-wing daily De Volkskrant.  He fits the profile of the average Dutchman’s opinion on American politics, however: Democrats are good, Republicans are evil. Media reports suggesting otherwise are hard to come by. Even the U.S. correspondent of the only serious conservative Dutch magazine, Elsevier, has caught on to Obamania.

Calling Mr. Obama’s predecessor Ronald Reagan “a man who underwent his intellectual development on the sets of cowboy movies,” another Volkskrant columnist, Michaël Zeeman, wrote the other day that “The Enlightenment [in the United States] transforms from down-to-earth rationalism into an ideal, sometimes even with religious features.  Until recently, that vision didn’t make you popular, but it turned Obama into the most acclaimed president in a long time — the president of a generation.”  Zeeman continues by saying that perhaps the biggest renewal is that there’s “someone at the helm who not only has brains, but is not embarrassed by that, either.”

Never mind that it’s an outright anachronism to deliver this kind of analysis on day two of President Obama’s first term.  Suffice it to say that President Reagan had a lot more to show for his popularity.  The message is clear, however, and quite similar to that of Mr. Von der Dunk: President Bush was a lazy, narrow-minded anti-intellectual, while his successor is an enlightened, zealous and bright cosmopolitan.  The fact that 46 percent of American voters still voted for John McCain in November demonstrates that their character resembles the former rather than the latter, one supposes.

So deeply ingrained in the Dutch mind is this one-dimensional image of U.S. politics and culture, that few readers will have noticed the irony of Mr. Zeeman representing the Enlightenment in the U.S. as an “ideal” with “religious features”.  For such is the case not just in America — or, at least, in Obama’s America — but in Europe as well.  Indeed, it has become characteristic of modern Enlightenment itself.

Indoctrinated by liberal propaganda for decades, the Dutch can no longer appreciate an ideal in which government is largely absent and in which a grass-roots civil society plays the first violin. With the Dutch government taking care of matters ranging from national security to welfare, abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, the climate, sustainable food products, development aid, and “community programs” for the inner-city minorities, all that is left in society is the individual and the liberal state.  The strong horizontal bonds that once characterized the Calvinist Dutch have now fully disappeared.  All that is left, is their vertical connection to the state, which no doubt knows what is best for us in all social, economic and cultural issues facing our little country.

The fact that the Dutch have come to thoroughly resent the multiculturalism imposed upon them by their elites, unfortunately doesn’t make them face this bigger picture.  The culture wars in the Netherlands are over, and we just don’t get what the fuss is about on the other side of the Atlantic.

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