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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller at the Bulwark. Welcome back to our page. I couldn't be happier to be bringing on my buddy Stan Boiger from over at aei. He's a senior fellow. He is a native Dutchman. We have great news for the people of our YouTube feed, which is so rare we get to do this together. The good news is in the Netherlands, not in America. But you know, that's okay, right?
- [00:20]
B
I think.
- [00:21]
A
So. Are we calling you Dutch? What do you call yourselves? What do we call the people of the Netherlands?
- [00:26]
B
Well, we call ourselves Nederlands.
- [00:29]
A
Nederlands, yeah.
- [00:30]
B
But Dutch is good. Dutch, American, that's just good.
- [00:33]
A
Okay, well, this is going to be a big change for me because for me, I always abided by the old, you know, Austin Powers line that there are only two things in the world I can't stand. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch, which we'll put on the screen for people a Goldfinger. But maybe that's not true. It just turned out it's not true. And I want to tell you why, Stan, because I read this article and it's like it's almost too good to be true. The Dutch are going to have a new prime minister. Rob Jetton. He's a gay man. All the good things are gay. He's married to Nicolas Keenan, an Argentine field hockey player who I have to admit is kind of handsome. He ran for office as like a quasi, I guess a central leftist. You can tell me, I'm reading this article. He is positive. He has a lot of positivity. He is an abundance liberal. He is patriotic. He says he wants to attack the far right aggressively when you need to. He also is pretty left on economics, but he's for a big tent. I mean, pinch me, is this true? Is this what's happening?
- [01:35]
B
Well, that's mostly true. You know, he wants to build 10 new cities, he says, you know, like real abundance liberalism there.
- [01:41]
A
New cities. I'm for new cities. Yeah.
- [01:43]
B
You know, so that's. That all sounds okay. A little, you know, a little more lefty on economics than I would like to see. And so I think, you know, he's been reasonably inspirational as those things go. Kid Wilders, who is our sort of famous right wing politician, you know, predates Trump even. He's our longest serving member of parliament by an eight year margin now. Like he's never going to go away, really. His party.
- [02:08]
A
The most famous moment about Geet Wilders, where I learned about him was Was he showed up at a Twinks for Trump event in New York in like 2015. So he has been a far right ideologue, you know, kind of a nationalist.
- [02:22]
B
Populist, like even and very anti Muslim, very anti immigration. You can kind of tell he is like a far right populist from like 20 years ago.
- [02:31]
A
Right.
- [02:31]
B
Those are his, those are his issues. So his party, after our previous election two years ago had become the largest party, but last week he lost a third of his seats. So I think that is definitely good news. The, you know, to go back to your hatred of the Dutch a little bit, the bad news is that all those seats that Wilders lost have gone to other heinous parties. And so the populace, right, so to speak, has remained of the same size, just their seats have gotten redistributed. So Wilder's lost a bunch of seeds to a party that, I don't know, sort of the Kevin Roberts faction, you know, fashion friendly, but respect, does some respectability politics. And he also lost some seeds to what you might think about the Nick Fuentes faction, you know, very comfortable with conspiracy theories, lost a bunch of MPs over a fight around anti Semitism, that kind of stuff. But so the far right as a whole I think has maintained its place in Dutch politics, which is not good.
- [03:28]
A
News though there's something that can be learned from this, all this. And the point, obviously there's a lot of differences in Netherlands and America, but you can get. And the system is different. Right. Like there aren't. The Republican Party is not going to fragment out into three different.
- [03:41]
B
That's right. It's pure proportional representation. Yeah.
- [03:44]
A
Yeah. That said though, wedging the right kind of learning that look, this is possible to wedge the right like that. They can be wedged between kind of a far right more openly anti Semitic party, more whatever traditionally Pat Buchananite, whatever you want to call it, like nationalist populist party and then kind of like a conservative Christian conservative. There's a way to get Fuentes and Mike Pence and the major body of MAGA and kind of cleave them off from each other to weaken the political powers of the right. I think there are probably some lessons to learn from that. The dissent of the left parties do that intentionally or just kind of. Did they light their own house on fire on the wilderness?
- [04:24]
B
I'd say they mostly lit their house on fire themselves. Especially that, that Fuentes esque party to form for democracy. They had people leave over just really self inflicted wounds. I would also say it's not really the left here that's been successful. It's really the sort of the broad center, the Dutch left, I would say, I would describe as being in, in, in just complete despair. They're sort of two large parties, the Green Left and the Labor Party. The Labour Party used to be one of our two large parties, right. We had a Christian Democratic Party and a Labor Party. The Labour Party is in the middle of merging with the Green Left and their goal was really to unite the left. Instead, what they've done is they lost seats. So they're now down to 20 out of 150 seats. You have a few other more fringy left wing parties to their left, but if you take the left as a whole, they got smaller. So you have an animal rights party, you have a Turkish nationalist party. You have all sorts of flavors, but.
- [05:23]
A
Even way more fun over there.
- [05:24]
B
That's cute. No, no, it's good. In fact, the Animal Rights party, the Party for the animals, it's been around, been around for a while. They got into a fight during this election campaign where a bunch of their founders quit because they were upset that the Party for the Animals was supportive of increased defense spending under the NATO banner. So they started their own separate animal rights party called Peace for Animals, which is for animal rights and against increased defense spending. So, you know, we have all of our flavors, but even if you add up all the different Judean Popular Front parties, it still adds up to very little. And so that really, that's important to keep in mind too. It's a resurgence center more than the resurgence of the left.
- [06:06]
A
Well, sure. And again, there's something to be learned from this because this goes to what we're talking about on the center left and the resistance in America. We don't have to navigate a pro war animal rights faction really, but there, there are factions you got to deal with. And so this, the centrist party that won the D66 with Rob Jetton, the Pearson win, that he's poised to be the prime minister, you know, as I mentioned at the top. And he went with what we, what they describe as kind of a progressive patriotism type message. You know, proudly kind of pro, pro Dutch, wearing orange, you know, doing that sort of stuff. Yeah, not being, not, not, you know, kind of being a left party that like down talks everything that is happening about, you know, progress, societal progress. In addition to that, as we kind of mentioned a little bit at the top, I want to go through all this kind of what they want to do on the economic side, possibly the center left was strengthened because they kind of co opted some of the left messaging or some left policies on economics. They proposed a millionaires tax, networked more progressive inheritance and gift tax, the abolition of a regressive mortgage interest deduction. And so they do kind of co opt some of these left, you know, redistrict redistributionist economic policies. But at least in this article, you tell me if you agree with this. There's no like de growth talk, none of the like kind of the anti capital.
- [07:33]
B
I also think, I mean they're going to, because we have so many different small parties, they're going to have to end up following a coalition with at least two parties that are to their right. And so a lot of those more lefty economic policies are not actually going to happen. Which I think also made people a little more comfortable voting for them. But you know, you may see the mortgage interest deduction getting phased out. Right. So some of that will survive. But I think more important than that was really the upbeat tone positivism, you know, the Dutch flags everywhere, EU flags as well, by the way, you know, a little more of a cosmopolitan nationalism you might call it. So I do, I do agree with that, that that tone is important, that it's not all oh, everything is bad, capitalism is horrible, you know that it definitely did not have that tone. And then as you mentioned yet and himself very young, he's 38, you know, a good looking gay guy, you know, that all helps I think.
- [08:29]
A
Okay, let's go ahead and put him up on the screen. I don't want to make you uncomfortable here but let's look at him in here and his hus. Not bad to look at. I mean this stuff matters in politics. But what else besides just the superficial did you think, did he succeed? And messaging wise, strategically.
- [08:46]
B
Yeah, just staying upbeat, talking about a positive agenda, new cities growth, that kind of stuff. Not complaining about, not complaining about inequality, obviously talking about where he might get some revenue. But the goal is not to eradicate millionaires as a class or something like that. Like that. Right. It's to have a, you know, to collect revenue from different sources. Yeah, very comfortable with free trade, all those things, you know, it's, it's a little more, it's a lot more neoliberal than sort of an American left wing agenda.
- [09:19]
A
It's interesting. And again obviously you don't want to over interpret all this stuff but you know, we're taping this right now on election day and presumably Zoram Mandani will win the New York Mayor's race. And I think that, like, you know, after, when somebody has political success comes out from nowhere, everybody's trying to co opt what it means to like, match their own prior ideological interests. And I think all this stuff is complicated. And I think that Zoran's success is surely, at least in New York City, you know, his progressive economic views, his views against Israel, like, surely helps, like, gain excitement in the left side of his party. Also, though, his affect is what you're saying. He's. He was very positive. He's. He's smiling, he's uplifting. He's talking about giving people opportunity. Like, it is not dour. It is, you know, it is not downbeat. And, and he's good at that part of politics. And there's kind of been this question among whatever you want to call it, the neoliberal abundance faction is like, can we have our Zo run? Like, is that possible? And who knows whether that's possible in America. But it sounds like. Yet in like, basically, like, at least at the superficial level, not the policy level, is kind of offering that, like, can I be an. I'd be a positive person that's focused on economic opportunity and the things that people are worried about and do it from a more center position.
- [10:37]
B
Yeah. And it's a little easier too, in the Netherlands to rely on sort of pure campaign tactics because there are so many different parties. And really, if you gain a few percentage points here and there, you can jump from being relatively small to relatively big. You don't have to unite 50% of the country under one banner. And so I think that also makes those tactical moves a little more deterministic than they are in the US where you have these broad underlying ideological divides that you have to navigate carefully.
- [11:05]
A
What about, where do you land on immigration? And obviously, immigration was such a flashpoint there for Wilders and across Europe, really. And it's driven a big part of the rise of the populist right. Like, how did he navigate the.
- [11:16]
B
Immigration remains a major issue. So our two most recent governments fell over this disputes over asylum policy, which, of course, in immigration politics in Europe is more important because there's a lot of immigration that takes place within the European Union. A lot of labor migration is, you know, is, you know, operates on the open borders because there's free movement within the European Union. So you, you cannot really control that part. And so a lot more of the focus is on. On refugee policy, asylum policy. What Yetin did there is. He sounded a little more restrictionist than D66 had done before. And that was true in general for parties. I think on the sort of center left in the Netherlands, you had the labor, the Labor, Green left combination, and even the formerly Maoist Socialist Party. They both announced numerical targets which they'd never done before. Numerical targets that are comparable sort of, once you correct the size of country with what we had in the US pre Biden, so, you know, like net million a year migration or so that scaled down for the Netherlands. And so that was, I think, a really a move that they, that that showed they realized that it's one issue where I think the sort of elite in the Netherlands had gotten out of line with the voting public. You know, a bit like in the US I think you see that in quite a few countries where public opinion is just clearly more conservative than elite opinion. And so, you know, they adjusted a little bit to that, and I think it's worked. We'll see what they do with it when they're in government. One thing that really helped there is, of course, Wilders was in government or his party was in government before the election, and they didn't really accomplish anything on that front or on any other front.
- [13:00]
A
Well, we'll do one more picture here of Rob Yetton just in case people are wondering. And then my final question for you.
- [13:07]
B
Is we've got a whole new generation of elderly millennials, by the way, now in control. Everyone's 40.
- [13:15]
A
Yeah. Things are going to turn around. We're the only sane generation. Okay. The elder millennials we came up, our brains weren't broken by the phones because during our childhood and teen years, we did not have phones. Right. But then we're early enough to doctors that we can understand how to navigate the phones. So everyone above us is insane because they didn't understand how to navigate it. Their brains were broken by Fox. Everyone below us is addicted to phones. Jonathan Haidt, Anxious generation. We're the sweet spot. So as long as you, as long as you put gay elder millennials in charge of your country, things might be looking up.
- [13:52]
B
Or even straight elders.
- [13:54]
A
Or even straight. Sure, whatever. I'll let a straight one happen to. Final question then, Stan. Any thoughts on remigration? I don't know. Things D66 sounding a little better than what we're putting.
- [14:07]
B
One thing jokes aside, one thing that I think is going to really help these 66 on the migration front is that the, the, the Assad regime, of course, was toppled about a year ago, and so inflows of Syrians have, have gone down by. If Syrian refugees have gone, have gone down by a lot and quite a few Syrians now want to go back and so I think that will be something for them to, to point to and of course it's a, you know, a positive development across the board so hopefully, you know, that'll help them.
- [14:34]
A
Felt like a duck of my question about you though. Are you going to be replacing Assyrian moving back?
- [14:40]
B
I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here for now.
- [14:42]
A
We'll see how I had a great.
- [14:44]
B
Nature of the regime evolves.
- [14:46]
A
Yeah, I had a great two days in Amsterdam this summer. Okay. The bikes are scary. Bikes are coming at you.
- [14:51]
B
They come from everywhere. Yeah.
- [14:53]
A
But it is a beautiful country. Stan Voiger, we'll be checking back in with you on all things economics and Netherlands as the thing as we move forward in the coming months. Thanks so much, man.
- [15:02]
B
Thanks, Tim.