Advice for Europe: What's the Best Way to Blunt Right-Wing Populism?

European leaders are now struggling with a challenge that has long bedeviled Americans on both the left and in the center: How do you blunt the appeals of right-wing populists?

The conservative populist playbook has a timeless power, and two of its key strategies are especially potent: 1) Attack faceless government bureaucrats that are meddling in people's lives; and 2) Attack people who look different and are changing things.

Of course, also, these strategies have been hugely successful here in the United States, where anti-statism and xenophobia have been almost two sides of the same conservative coin for over a hundred years. But those core themes were less salient from the 1970s up through 2004 because of the power of the Christian right and a raging culture war. As the social wedge issues and the evangelical power have faded, though, we've seen the right's more traditional face in the Tea Party, an anti-statist movement infused with xenophobia.

I wish we Americans had a better track record to point to in offering advice to Europe, but we don't. American liberals have never done well in dealing with right-wing populists. The McGovern faction of the Democratic Party tried to ignore them and spent a few decades in exile. Centrists like Bill Clinton sought to propitiate them by tacking to the middle. President Obama has alternately caved to the Tea Party crazies or been thwarted by them.

http://www.demos.org/blog/5/27/14/whats-best-way-blunt-right-wing-populism

Suggestions on how to deal with the right's traditional reliance on attack on big government and its use of xenophobia.